A Shout in the Ruins

by Kevin Powers

  They walked toward town and entered the theater around three o’clock, a few minutes before the curtain rose, ascending the staircase marked CROATAN slowly enough that George was only slightly winded when they sat down beyond the rope strung across the far corner of the balcony. The picture was Shane, and George could plainly see that Lottie was giddy in her seat.

  As the opening newsreels began in the projector’s first bright light, all silver and swirling black, a voice described a fleet of bombers encircling the world. They would use, if necessary, roads as runways, and George recognized one of these depicted on the reel. From an aerial view, perhaps shot from the belly of one of these great flying beasts, the cavernous gash through Jackson Ward appeared. It seemed to him not unlike a wound in the city of Richmond itself, a hole so vast its bottom would be at best theoretical. The angle changed and a man stood before the ruins of the ward, his hand swept up as if the scope of the destruction required gesticulation as accompaniment, and yet his voice spoke only of triumph as the crew and equipment disappeared from view, descended finally into the unseen depths to contend with bedrock.

  He did not know when the footage had been shot, but the scope and scale of the alterations to the neighborhood he’d known as home for many years were irrevocable. It occurred to him that even the landmarks of his plain, uninteresting life were almost unrecognizable when mediated by the sweeping cinematic shots and the enthusiastic confidence of the reporter’s voice. There was a brief period, a moment of apprehension, when he thought perhaps all this erasure had occurred in another Richmond, another south, on a far unmapped side of the world, and that if he retraced his steps, asked the girl to put him on the Greyhound back to Fayetteville, rode the train northward toward Virginia over the endless strands of the great bay’s thousand rivers, he would find his home unchanged, Leona tall and dark and beautiful, smiling at him without resentment or regret for their childlessness as he pulled the Zephyr to the curb and let the Motorola play some song she loved, and the ward would bustle as a lived-in place should. But no, I am an exile again, he thought. A wound as deep as the sea, just as Henry Levy had said. Behind the reporter, he saw a house that looked very much like the one he’d lived in with his wife, and then alone after he’d buried her at Oakwood, and had finally abandoned mere hours before they tore it down. When he’d bought the house, with a mortgage from St. Luke Penny Savings in the neighborhood, he stayed up all night for a week peering out the curtains, waiting for someone to take it away from him. Finally, so many years later, they had come. In the footage, a man emerged from the door of the house. He stood on the porch and leaned out over the chasm. He wore a white suit in the footage and was likely not intended to be captured by the camera, but nevertheless was. George wondered what rummaging had gone on, what the workmen might have scavenged from his home, if what had been precious to him had been handled with derision and contempt, perhaps a child’s unused baptismal gown on the smallest hanger in his closet, or a picture of his late wife in an unguarded moment. He knew the answer, of course. In some places, and at some times, no distinction between public and private life is allowed. You might as well be put out naked in the street. And while he did not know the extent of this exposure, he did not think this fact qualified as mercy.

  A few folks had been given payments for their homes, though even these were cruelly absurd in their distance from what the market would have declared appropriate. For the rest of his neighbors, a declaration of eminent domain compounded their powerlessness. Over the following months they watched the wreckage of their homes as the debris was trucked from the open mouth of the construction site toward the landfills along Jeff Davis Highway. All this was witnessed from the windows of their newly assigned apartments in Gilpin Court, on the northern border of the construction site, poorly built and soon forgotten, from which they would turn away so as not to be reminded further that the old order changes not.

  George knew the story, though he had not seen the picture nor heard much about it, except that Jack Palance had apparently given a strong turn as the villain. He knew the story because he had heard it said that really there are only two kinds: one in which a hero goes on a journey, the other in which a stranger comes to town. He smiled and Lottie looked over at him and he shifted in his seat, adopting an attentive posture so she would know his mood should not be mistaken for a dismissive attitude toward the movie she had chosen. He was smiling because it occurred to him that maybe there was really only one story; suppose the hero on his journey winds up as a stranger in your town?

  After the movie ended it began to rain. They stood under the small marquee and waited, hoping that the storm would pass so they could get the car. George felt himself wheeze a bit, and though it was a summer storm, he instinctively pulled the collar of his light jacket tight. Lottie acted out scenes on the sidewalk, turning her hands into pistols and shooting everything in sight, like only someone who has never seen one fired outside of the movies can do. Lottie gushed about Alan Ladd on horseback, his skill with a gun, the boy shouting for him to come back, but George thought his character responsible for the consequences that befell all involved, that he had a delusional nature. And anyway, though he agreed Ladd was as good in parts as Lottie said, he was also disappointed, because George couldn’t shake the feeling that Ladd was afraid of horses, and he was sure he saw him flinch whenever his gun went off.

  Palance’s was the performance he really admired. There was honesty in it. Whoever said a rifle on a wall was an opportunity for suspense must have been European. As if there would ever be a question of its getting fired or not in America. The gun goes off when the line gets crossed, and the line got crossed a long time ago, when we were naked and wandered the savanna and slept beneath the baobab trees. When is simply a matter of how long it takes to get it out of the holster, how long it takes the bullet to arrive. Perhaps days or weeks or months, perhaps one’s whole life, but these are questions of distance and trajectory, of time and physics, and not of possibility. George thought Palance must be an actor of rare talent, because those dark, pinpricked eyes told the truth at the heart of every story, that violence is an original form of intimacy, and always has been, and will remain so forever.

  * * *

  George never carried a gun himself. There were times he wished he had in the immediate and unnavigable anger he sometimes found himself in at inexplicable moments, but to be who he was in the places and times through which he lived made the prospect difficult. To pick up a pistol and hold it in a hand that looked like his, well, it could be said he might as well put the barrel against his head and save the middlemen the trouble. And so even as a much more robust man than the one who sat in the theater and watched Alan Ladd kill the only honest man in the whole damn movie, he carried nothing but his delicate knife with the handle of elk antler to protect himself. He never used it to that end, though he remained ready to do so if the need arose. He had no interest in martyrdom, or in turning either cheek, and valued peace less than his life, but this is not to say George regarded life as precious generally, or that if he did he was uniquely perceptive to it. He was not particular in that way. He was sure only that his life ought to belong to him. And he was content to let other men determine what that value might be if they had the starch to pay what it would cost to take it from him, from those hands of his so suited to bringing down with a swinging blade that which nature had taken a hundred years or more to raise. Those were the terms the world had offered him, and so he did his best to keep his ledger balanced, and to worry less about that unknowable cost than what he might be paid for a hard day’s work.

  The knife was in the back pocket of his dungarees when he put Great Dismal behind him for good in the wake of Huggins’s death, not realizing he was retracing his steps more closely than he could have wished those many years later when he arrived alone in Pembroke at the end of his life. He headed south and east toward the Outer Banks at the tail end of a distant February, first riding a log-laden barge to the te
rminus of the swamp’s canal in the town of South Mills just on the other side of the North Carolina border. He then walked for two days and nights along the edges of dirt roads not yet having to resist their being buried by the wild growth of the coastal plains in spring. When he arrived at Camden Courthouse, he smelled the winter sea, though he could not see it yet. It was dusk and the Pasquotank River drained into the sound through a line of drowned trees. The lights of Elizabeth City on the river’s western shore inspired in him a feeling he could not name. It was not nostalgia, nor wistfulness, nor longing, but there was a bit of melancholy in it, though George acknowledged that this was the terrain many of his feelings were native to. And though the past surely played a part, he had never been to Elizabeth City, so it was not a place he missed or had ever even hoped to see. But the feeling bore a curious resemblance to contentment, too, and he slept soundly after watching the lights go out one by one, curled into his coat next to the dying embers of a fire, listening to the wind and the waves and the ringing of the buoy bells.

  In the morning he carried Huggins’s belongings to the dock in a pack slung over his shoulder and boarded a boat bound for the village of Kitty Hawk on Bodie Island. The knife lay next to an orange bandanna with which he wiped his brow from time to time when pausing to look out over the sound and the sea grass along the banks. One of the items in the pack was a letter bearing the address of Huggins’s people. He worried that to read it would be intrusive, even though Huggins could not object, buried as he was in a patch of artificially high ground near the logging camp George had left behind forever.

  In those days an address carried a different kind of specificity. It required the deliverer to have some knowledge of the destination beyond the rigorously systematic arrangement by which people, in later years, would fool themselves into thinking that a name and number constituted an accurate description of a place. And so George looked at the envelope on which was written in a delicate, faded cursive, Go north from Kitty Hawk toward Corolla, two houses past Douglas Slough’s dock on the sound side, the yellow one, but not yet to the place you can see the lighthouse from. With that as his guide after landing, George set off to tell the young man’s people that their son Huggins would not be coming back, and to perhaps console them if the news he carried did not make such a proposition impossible.

  He walked several miles along the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, passing a rescue station and a few hotels shuttered for winter, before stopping for the night. He did not know how far he had to go yet, but he had walked all day through the sand, stopping often to watch the banker ponies graze on wind-whipped cordgrass and gallop through the rising gray tide. He slept in the dunes where the ribbon of sand seemed at its thinnest, not even a hundred yards wide, and he felt an unusual claustrophobia after nightfall when the vastness of both sea and sound were swallowed by a darkness immune to human measurement. He was glad to be out of the wind, though, and eventually the claustrophobia passed and instead with the stars and the water’s constant roar came a sense that everyone on earth was irrelevant, that if the world were emptied of people tomorrow they would not be missed at all, not by bird nor beast, or God up in heaven or the devil down in hell. It took a bit of getting used to, but he was surprised how comforting it was to feel that this was so.

  He found the house quite easily the following afternoon. Though inefficient, the address was accurate, and when he saw the redbrick spire of the lighthouse through the pines, he turned around, confident that he was close. After a few more minutes of searching he found himself in the Hugginses’ dooryard. A rooster strutted across the sandy ground, and he saw a pen behind the house in which two sturdy horses trotted casually. He knocked on the door. A man not much older than George opened it. The man had the Down East way of speaking, which surprised him a little, as Huggins had been so free of accent in his speech that it must have required a great effort for him to get that way. His father, on the other hand, spoke with a sound as thick as the center of a marsh, and George could not understand much of what was being said at first, though when the man waved him in and said, “Mother, some woodser come and want to talk,” he followed. They sat around a table. George looked through the window and out past the scrub and cattails where the sound was still as stone, and the winter sun did little to distinguish the gray sky from the water below it. He told them what had happened to their son, that he had been a fine young man and a good worker. The woman got up from the table and walked toward the back door.

  “Drime,” she said.

  “She don’t believe it,” the man said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I told the boy, ‘High tide on the sound side. Nothing for you there. Work to do yet here. A good thing to have work to do.’ But he thought he were something special. Would even say so, a hurtful thing because it’s telling everyone else they ain’t.”

  George began to say that he was sorry again, but held it back, and instead placed his knapsack on the table and removed Huggins’s things from it one by one. There was a notebook, in which George recognized the delicate cursive from the unopened letter, and then the letter itself, which Huggins’s father tucked immediately into his shirt pocket. There was also a small driftwood carving of a fishing trawler that had fishing line strung from the mast and crane as a gesture toward mechanical accuracy. He took out the boy’s clothes and became embarrassed because his own had gotten mixed in with them.

  With the objects finally arrayed on the table it seemed astonishing to George that even a short life could leave so little behind. But he silently acknowledged that from his own there would be even less.

  “So that’s it, then,” the man said.

  “I suppose it is,” said George.

  Outside the small house they heard his mother crying, and they looked at each other as if to say that they hoped the other might be able to do something about it. But there was nothing to be done that time could not do better. The look on the father’s face changed. He rose from his chair and went to get his coat from where it hung on a peg next to the doorframe. George thought he sensed the man’s desire to be alone, but he was mistaken, for what he sensed was the man’s terror of exactly that.

  George followed him out. They walked to the rear of the yard where the horses pawed distractedly at the ground. The horses were not tall, and had low-set tails, but were broad and healthy like the ponies George had seen running along the shore. The man hitched them to a cart and slapped the seat next to his, and George sat down beside him. The woman had gone inside already, but they could hear her weeping still, even over the noise of the wooden wheels rolling over the rock-hard sand.

  “It’s me who Mother’ll think done it,” he said.

  The day had warmed up some. The sun broke through the clouds and lit up the ocean with a blue-green light as they rode along it heading south.

  “To tell the truth,” George said, “if it was anyone, it was me. I was struck ill a while back and it was me and Hug working together generally. But I was laid up. He might have listened if I’d been there. Or done something or not done some other thing. I don’t know.”

  “Well, that won’t suit Mother, I’ll tell you. She’ll fix it on me, and you’ll just upset her further if you make her work at it. See, the boy was not nobody that ought to have made big plans, but Mother says I speak too much about my disappointments, and I give the boy the notion that we have some say in the matter.”

  George did not respond. But he understood.

  “And so it would not matter one lick to her if I was at fault for his leaving, or his staying, or his not coming back. They’s all rolled up in one parcel.”

  It seemed unusual for a man to speak so openly about his life, especially down south where you’d get to know about a person best when they were not around and someone else was left to do the telling. The changes of the last thirty or forty years had been hard on the people out there on the far edge of America. The man told him how his family’s trade had been in scavenging, and that i
n his father’s youth a man could feed his family from it. How he’d go down to Cape Point, hang a lantern from a horse’s neck, and lead the horse up and down the beach. The bob of the light in the darkness would look to sailors like just another ship at sea, and once in a while they’d bust their hull up on the Wimble Shoals. The Gulf Stream would put the sailors on the beach a while later, and his father would then push his dinghy in the water to collect what the sea had not wanted for itself.

  “Was the shoals did it. I know what you woodsers think. But you can’t eat sand, and there’s only so much fish, so we took what the shoals give.” He paused. “I guess a feller thinks he needs to outdo his father.”

  “I expect that’s true,” said George.

  But those days were gone, and though the man was nostalgic for them, he reluctantly admitted it was for the best. “Man can drown in a puddle. Best not help it along when most folks will get there on their own in due time.” He asked George to keep his eyes open for anything along the beach that looked like it did not belong. George replied that he had seen the ocean for the first time just the day before and that he was not sure he would know what belonged or not. “That’s all right,” he said. “If it suits your eye, it’ll be just fine for the dingbatters at the hotel this summer.”

  Back at the house they sat around the cooking stove and sorted through their scraps. There was enough variety that the summer crowd might believe they’d found Blackbeard’s buried treasure in a wreck, as Mr. Huggins aimed to tell them.

  They asked George if he wanted to stay with them awhile. He accepted. As easily as they shared their home and lives with him, his willingness to be equally open came more slowly. For obvious reasons, but also perhaps because his disposition required caution in matters such as these, George was free with gratitude, and assistance, and labor of all kinds, but not with affection, and less so with his history. “He’s a stoic, Mother,” the man would say. George would only smile without opening his mouth, and wonder why he felt that delivering the fateful message to them about their son’s accidental death had transformed into the repayment of a debt. And he did not know it at the time, but their greatest act of kindness was to allow him to repay that debt, though they knew quite well by then that George Seldom did not owe the world a thing.