by Kevin Powers
“George, my friend. You are looking well today,” he said as he reached out to shake his hand. Henry Levy was middle aged, with a youthful energy well suited to his profession. He was the third Henry Levy to have operated Levy’s grocery. The first was his grandfather, who opened it after a not unreasonably distinguished period of service with the Quartermaster Corps of the Confederate Army of Tennessee. George shook his hand and said, “You looking well, your own self, Mr. Levy, if you don’t mind my saying.” He smiled and led George to a parlor chair near the storefront windows and asked him if he’d care for something to drink. George waved him off wordlessly and took in the emptiness of the shop that had, over time, become a fixture of the neighborhood and a common piece of his own world. “So, y’all’ll be leaving, too, I guess?”
“Well, George,” Mr. Levy said, “Route One just isn’t going to carry people the way it used to now.” His speech was a mixture of Philadelphia schools and the Tidewater South, accented by the Hebrew his father had made sure he learned at temple. It was a drawl nearly, but not quite, canceled out by the ancient tongue he carried with him despite its loneliness in the land in which his family had finally settled. “We’re moving to a place across the river.”
“All the way out to the counties?” George asked, with more than a little surprise.
“You know we used to get people stopping in from as far as Florida?” said Levy.
“Maine, too, I think I’ve heard you say.”
“Yes. Maine, too. Canada. Philadelphia. Now…?” He made a sound like paper tearing and moved his hands in an accompanying theatricality. “A wound as deep as the sea.”
Maine to Florida, thought George. North to south, a road built and cultivated through commerce and commiseration.
“Now Eisenhower wants to build roads big enough for bombers to land on. For when the Russians come, I reckon.”
“Is that a fact?” asked George.
A sun shower began pelting the window in bands of light and rain. “I only know what the Times Dispatch says are the facts,” he said, raising his hands in mocking jest.
George laughed and looked out the window. He imagined the great silver belly of a bomber, big as the sky, circling the corbeled facades and wrought-iron gates of Jackson Ward. Then circling wider over the statues of the white folks’ southern saints on Monument Avenue, over the cemetery on the hill, over all those poor slaves buried behind Main Street Station where Lumpkin would toss their bodies out like garbage when they’d die in his jail, over the river, over the South, the United States, and the whole damn world. “Well, Mr. Levy, I guess if he’s gonna send them planes up, which he’s surely gonna do, he’s damn sure gonna give ’em somewhere to land.”
The rain put a pause on that stretch of the interstate’s construction for the day. Several men jogged past the storefront in hard hats, splashing their Red Wings through the newly formed puddles, laughing very much like the children George had seen playing in the empty lot before. The oldest worker’s belly shook like a sack of discarded cats as he jogged, and as he splashed into a puddle before they reached Broad Street, he shouted gleefully, “Maybe if we’re lucky all these niggers’ll drown!”
George turned toward Mr. Levy slowly and deliberately, not with anger but curiosity. Mr. Levy had turned away and was arranging a stack of papers on the counter. George could not articulate his feelings in that moment exactly, but it seemed to him that Mr. Levy had not turned away in shame, not quite, but rather had turned away in an effort to avoid the shame he knew was floating unclaimed in the front room of his shop.
The quiet was interrupted by the sound of a flatbed truck pulling up into the loading zone out front on Marshall Street. Tarps ruffled back from their anchors. George had forgotten why he’d come. It was not the first time. He sometimes felt as if time were speeding up like a car with a stuck gas pedal, and though he had long since set aside the self-pity that can accompany the certainty that one’s death is closer than one’s birth, he remained filled with frustration. He would have the clarity of an ending, had even set aside six hundred dollars for Crawley’s Funeral Home on St. James to do him up right and lay him down next to his second wife, Leona, in the second of two plots at Oakwood Cemetery he’d bought for them when they were flush. The city had surrendered all but the small Confederate section to the encroaching forest in the years since, and though he visited her grave quite a bit just after she’d passed, over time he could not think of much to say to her, nor did he have much faith she would have heard him if he did. He doubted he’d be buried there when the time came anyway, as he figured it would take six men a month of digging to clear out enough of the creeping ivy to find the dirt in which to lay him down.
As to his beginning, he knew nothing. That part of him had been a void so long it had taken shape around its edges. How was it that he’d found himself as a small boy, filthy with dust, waiting alone on the porch of a spinster’s house at the edge of the Lumber River in North Carolina with nothing but his name, the clothes he wore, and a hurriedly inscribed note that said Look after me. I now belong to you. Before this, there was nothing, perhaps a name some days. No, not a name, someone calling for a nurse in the farthest reaches of his memory. So far back it isn’t even a memory but a story he imagines listening to, of which he can recall neither the tale nor the teller, hopeful that at some point in the past the truth had a chance of getting told.
He woke to Henry Levy the fourth calling to him, gently shaking his shoulders. “George. George. You’ve nodded off.” Mr. Levy’s only son and heir stood over him. He was handsome, about twenty years old, and tanned as dark as George from his weekend train rides down to Virginia Beach. His hair was cut close like a soldier’s. “Are you all right, George?” he asked.
“I’m fine, son. Fine. Just got to reminiscing. Saps my strength these days.”
“Aw, hell,” the younger Henry said, “seems like you got plenty of life left in you, old-timer.”
He had his father’s cultivated warmth. It would serve him in good stead over the years. He and his father would go on to open another grocery store in Forest Hill, and then another out near Midlothian, then leverage those into a number of A&Ps with which they had even greater success.
“Henry, my young friend,” George said, “didn’t anybody ever tell you that seems ain’t is?”
Mr. Levy wrote out an address on a piece of paper and gave it to George. “The new shop,” he said. “Come see us.” And then, “Will you stay in the city? I know some folks are taking the city up on that municipal housing between here and Northside. Gilpin Court? Sounds kind of nice, has sort of a regal air to it.”
“No,” George answered. “I’ve been in my own house too long to start over. I thought they’d be taking me out feetfirst before long, but now, I don’t know. It’s one of the ones getting torn down. Got a little money for it from ’em, but a damn sight less than it’s worth.” He paused and then said, “You know, Mr. Levy, it occurs to me that y’all might be the last white folks in the neighborhood.”
Henry the younger paused in the doorway at this comment and turning back toward the older man said, “Don’t worry, George. We might be white folks here in the ward, but we’ve lived in this town long enough to know that the Levys will be Jews again by the time we hit the Nickel Bridge and cross that river.”
A few hours later George sat in Broad Street Station’s colored waiting room. When he had first come to Richmond in the teens, he had watched mule teams pull stumps from the edges of the land on which the station had been built. A marble hall raised up out of the manure stink of the abandoned fairgrounds’ stockyard. And now through the frosted glass of the waiting room he could hear the jostle and buzz of travelers in the marble rotunda, here and there snippets of a tour: “The man who made the Jefferson Memorial…noble rooms…a hierarchy of spaces…the synthesis of all the highly mannered styles.”
He had not taken much from the house he’d left behind; a few changes of clothes, a copy of The Negro Travelers’ Gr
een Book, another book he’d been given as a gift by Mr. Levy’s late father, and a lovely little knife with a handle of elk antler that he’d owned as long as he could remember. In his shirt pocket he had a one-way ticket for the 1:55 Everglades of the Atlantic Coast Line that would put him off near Fayetteville that evening, not far from where his childhood memories began. He thought of the dust of North Carolina roads, high white light in summer falling through a trellis of leaning hardwood and plumb-straight pine, the black water of the motionless Lumber River. How cool it was to swim in once. And how bitter the tannins still sometimes tasted in his mouth.
He bought a copy of the News Leader, looked at his watch, and sat back down on the wooden bench next to his suitcase. Senator Harry Flood Byrd’s smiling face looked back at him from its perch next to a gushing editorial. “Massive Resistance” read the headline. He folded up the broadsheet with a sigh and deposited it into a trash can just as the conductor called for boarding to begin.
The train rolled over the James River Railway Bridge’s gray arches in the angled light of the afternoon sun. The bridge had always seemed monumental to him at a distance. George could see boulders and white water. Slender islands covered with trees skirted the edges of the river’s main channel. The illusion of a wilderness remained. He thought, for a moment, that if he had his life to live again he would do it in a wild place. Montana. The solitude of the Andes he had once seen in a discarded issue of National Geographic as a boy. Trouble on his own terms. But he knew this kind of thinking was a fantasy. The trouble he was born with was not the kind that can be locked away in a cedar chest and left behind. And he also knew that the terms the world lays out for us are not negotiable.
He woke up as the train crossed another nameless watershed near the North Carolina border. The surface flat as paper. He did not expect answers more complete or satisfying than those he’d already been given. Maybe another question would come to mind. But he felt that all the questions people ask themselves are simply variations on “why.” Why me? Why her? Why now? He wondered if the world had been kind to him. It would take everything from him eventually, but it seemed to him that it would not take anything that had not belonged to the world first.
He’d noticed a young marine board the train back in Petersburg. As the evening progressed George saw that they were the only ones left in the car. The marine walked down the aisle toward George and asked, “May I join you, sir?”
“Of course, son. You sit right down.” George was in his seventies before he gave up the bristling resentment he’d previously felt toward the concern the young often have for the old. He didn’t mind it now. It was one small purpose he felt that he could still provide: from time to time putting his remaining pride aside so one human being could be useful to another. The boy, for most men in the world now seemed so much like boys to George, wore his green uniform smartly. Gold bars shined from his collar. A shield with wings above a few ribbons.
George asked him if he had kin in Petersburg.
“I did, but not anymore. We laid my grandmother to rest. I’m heading back to Cherry Point.”
“Where the rest of your people?” asked George.
“Kansas. Topeka.”
“Kansas?” George said, whistling. “Can’t say I ever made it there. What do you do in the service, son?” he asked.
“I’m an aviator, sir.”
“A what now?”
“I fly airplanes.”
The day before seemed a thousand years ago to George; the time before airplanes closer to Adam than to now. Fifty-some-odd years had passed since the Wrights flung their contraption off the dunes of Kill Devil Hills and ever so briefly into the sky. He’d been told about it not long after the unprecedented event by an itinerant worker named Huggins who’d come into the logging camp in the Great Dismal Swamp, the place that had been the closest thing to a home George would know for many years. Midwinter snow hung in the cypress branches. The foreman called a pause in the action. “Got a new rube here, boys, name of Huggins. Show him how we do things and don’t let him get hisself killed just yet.” A teenage boy strolled up and said, “Which of y’all Seldom? I’m supposed to be bucker to his faller.”
The boy could not contain himself. George had to remind him to go slow and pay attention, unless he wanted to get thumped stone dead before supper. They’d left a dozen men in the canals and black swamp water over the time George had worked there. He supposed whoever owned the operation, a detail he did not know, might figure that the ten thousand acres they’d clear-cut by then was a good return on that investment. And when he’d take the trail out to Lake Drummond, it seemed that the result of all their falling was to bring the broad lake near to level with the land, to have created a disconcerting relationship between earth and sky and water. The long scar of an open field where the swamp drained into the lake, bare but for a tangle of stumps on which, from time to time, an eagle might come to rest.
But the boy threw himself into talk and work, so much so that his voice began to register to George’s hearing as just another version of the hum and gurgle that accompanied their labor. Chattering beneath the drag of the mule sleds. Buzzing with the saws’ teeth as they cut logs to length. Shouting with the drumbeat of axes into bark. As they sat at supper near camp where the long dirt road, now dusted with snow, paralleled the canal, Huggins told George why he’d come.
“It’s progress I’m after, Mr. Seldom. Where else can I look up and see what I’ve accomplished at the end of the day, clear as this place here?”
And it was true, in a way, what the boy said. The gaps in the drowned forest were an indisputable record that they made more so every day.
George waited for Huggins to take a breath, then said, “Feller tells me a while back, when I first got put on, that most of these woods end up as shingles on rich folks’ summerhouses in New England. Mansions with their doors right up to the edge of the sea. And he tells me he gets a hankering to see ’em. This is back in ninety, maybe ninety-one. So he saves his pennies until he’s fixed for a train ticket to a place called Provincetown. And when he gets up there the damn place is lousy with cedar shake. He tells me they look right pretty, but they got to strip them off and put up new ones all the time on account of all the salt and sand and wind and whatnot. Water ain’t a problem, but they ain’t accounted for the rest. So, when he comes back down he gets to figuring how much clear-cut goes for one house, and these are right big houses now, and I ain’t never seen a sadder picture of a man. Also he tells me, goes into a tavern one night and gets to talking with this fancy joker got him a hotel right up there near the harbor, and this hotel got cedar and white cypress all over. And when this feller finds out my pal’s on a logging outfit, he sighs and says what a sin it is we doin’ to God’s creation. Now ain’t that just some shit?”
“A sign of the times is what I’d call it.”
“A sign of the times? Hug, you ain’t old enough to know ’em when you see ’em,” said George.
“Well, you might be right,” Huggins replied. “But I was just down on the Outer Banks a few weeks past and I seen two fellers out of Ohio put themselves up into the sky. Now tell me that ain’t some kind of augury.”
To hear Huggins tell it, the scene was one of singular beauty, of a kind that George could hardly comprehend and by which he was slightly terrified. He could only respond to the tale by infrequently offering stuttering questions, which might have seemed like rebuttals to passersby but for the timbre of his voice. “In the sky, you say? How far? Tell the truth now, Huggins. I ain’t as dumb as you think.”
“Honest Injun,” said Hug.
George eyed him curiously, then broke into laughter. “You almost had me there.”
“God as my witness, George.”
“I don’t believe it. You mean to tell me man can fly?”
And yes, that is what he meant to say. George could scarcely imagine it. Huggins’s voice persisted in the background as he saw sand and water rippling out forever,
indistinguishable in his colorless dream. It could have been the surface of the moon from which this strange machine sputtered. The plane drifted just above the sands, its white muslin wings nearly glancing the dunes, as if the dunes and nearby sea themselves unfurled the wings as flags, forever ceding their formerly terrestrial possession of mankind.
There was something irreconcilable to George about this knowledge. For days after he swung his ax in a desperate frenzy, twisting like a spun top until his legs sank into the black water of the swamp up to his knees, until the trees crashed down one by one into the water. He would look upward as the winter quiet of the swamp returned, searching the void left in the canopy for a white dot in transit across the small circle of sky that he’d helped make. He did not expect to see the plane, of course. Truthfully, he did not know what he hoped to see, but he knew he had not seen it. And he began to doubt he ever would.
George fell into a depression not long after giving up his search of the skies above Great Dismal. And when Huggins was killed by the unexpected trajectory of the fall of a giant Atlantic white in the first week of February 1904, the boy’s death took its place among all the unanswerable questions from his life. He had not been the faller on that one, having been laid out by a fever, and he was lying in his tent when the team came back in moody silence, the first time they had done so since before Huggins had arrived. Perhaps the rest of the crew anticipated that he would feel responsible for having been absent when the boy was struck, so they assured him there was nothing he or anybody else could have done to stop it. “Goddamn tree barber-chaired on him like you wouldn’t believe, George,” they said. And so to close the subject they agreed that it had been overdue, that the swamp had not been paid for what she had given up in a good long while.
George thought of Huggins often after the boy’s death. Logrolling in the icy water of the Dismal Swamp Canal. The boy’s freckled face beaming carelessly, eyes closed, as he spun a length of timber under the heels of his boots. When George got sick after hearing about the Wright brothers, Huggins brought him soup and bread and hot coffee every morning before the crew went out for the day. He remembered Huggins saying to him once, “You don’t seem the way people told me black fellers would be when I was coming up.” And George rolled over under his blanket, wanting to ask Huggins why he thought someone else got to decide the way he was supposed to be, but he did not ask it. “You almost a halfway-decent feller, Hug,” he said instead.