by Kevin Powers
“Take a good long gander, Rawls,” said Reid. “I don’t want to feel you staring at my back every time I turn around.”
“Pardon, Mr. Reid. It’s just been so long since I seen you.”
“I take it you missed me, then?” he asked.
“Let me help you up, sir.”
Reid swatted away Rawls’s outstretched hand as Nurse helped him climb into the rearward-facing backseat of the carriage. “The girl’s the one who helps me,” he said. “What do you know about my needs?”
Nurse joined Rawls on the driver’s bench. He looked at the child without judgment. They knew their true reunion would have to wait, so they began a silent one at the front of the carriage, and Nurse, too, felt her breath push against the walls of her chest, and the tears fell from her unblinking eyes and down her cheeks, until she tasted their sweetness at the corners of her silent mouth. She was overcome with joy, but also dread, for she had known as soon as she saw Rawls slumping down next to the carriage that this reunion had been arranged for reasons she did not understand by the man they would all soon see.
“Take me home, Rawls,” said Reid.
Rawls looked at Nurse as if to tell her something, but only turned his head toward the reins again and whipped the mules to get them going.
They retraced Rawls’s earlier journey on their return, over the old stone piers of the bridge that spanned the fall line, then climbed the crest of the low river valley where the turnpike began its dusty lurch toward the Piedmont and the endless wave of blue-gray mountains that lay beyond the hills. They almost immediately passed the abandoned terminus of the narrow-gauge line from which Bob and his mule team had derived a living. The wood of the platform was mostly stripped off; some to make lean-tos and hovels along the riverbank that housed the war’s destitute and bereft, still more removed to build earthworks and fortifications out toward the wide, flat water of City Point.
Bob knew very little of what had transpired since he’d left with the Volunteer Dragoons at the war’s outset. He knew that his wife was dead. That his daughter had been ensconced in the overseer’s house at Beauvais Plantation for more than half a year. But he did not know that the house his first slave had built by hand years before her birth had been torn down and scattered among the tinkers and scrappers who picked the land clean of any precious thing like they were opossums after carrion.
He saw the end of the narrow-gauge line and the stripped bones of the warehouse as they passed and said nothing. What am I now? he wondered. To Rawls, no longer a master. To Virginia, no more useful than all the dead men in their graves. And it was what he saw in the eyes of others that vexed him most, for what he saw was their collective shame at his return, at his mere endurance. Not that it would ever be said out loud, he understood very well, but no one is waiting to praise a man whose body is marked up by his failures, especially if his brokenness serves to mark theirs just as well.
They passed the pebble road that stood at the entrance to his land and drove on. “Home, I said, Rawls.”
“Mr. Levallois wants me to come to Beauvais first,” he said. “You know I got to do what he says now, Mr. Reid,” said Rawls.
Rawls steered the carriage down the big house’s long drive, flanked on either side by rows of gnarled cedars. Nurse saw Levallois standing at the high point of the front acreage next to a man in a dusty black suit, and she grabbed at Rawls’s right knee instinctively. She grabbed it so hard that she hurt him, and at the same time she squeezed George to her side so tightly that he began to bawl. She let go quickly and did not look over at Rawls even when she felt his eyes on her. She sang to the baby softly, and it was hard to hear the words she sang as the newborn boy cried. Nurse looked back at Reid, but his eyes remained fixed to the road down which they’d come, seemingly indifferent to the continuing existence of the world.
“Here they are, sir,” Rawls said to Levallois when they pulled abreast of him.
“Good man, Rawls. Good man. Excuse me for a moment while I welcome the return of our conquering hero,” Levallois said, then put his foot on the carriage’s step. He moved to grab Bob’s shoulder but grabbed instead the empty, pinned-up gray fabric of the sleeve. Reid looked at Levallois for a moment with his top teeth bared like a whipped dog and then collected himself. Levallois pulled his hand back and laughed apologetically, then placed the back of his hand softly against the unkempt beard on Reid’s cheek, as though he were a sick child. “You’ve been missed, Bob. Sorely missed. But now you’re home and great things are soon to come to pass for both of us.”
“I just want to see Emily,” he said.
“She’s been waiting for you.”
Levallois then reached out for Nurse as if to take the baby from her, but she leaned away imperceptibly, leaving him to say, “I bet he’ll grow up to be a big strong nigger, Nurse. What do you think, Rawls?”
Rawls stared at the backs of the mules. “Yes, sir,” he said quietly. “I expect you’re right.”
Levallois leaned in toward Rawls and almost whispered, “He hardly even looks like a pickaninny, does he, Rawls? I tell you, the child looks damn near like an Indian, his skin’s so light, don’t you think?”
Bob was lost in thought, wondering what world he had returned to. He’d dreamed a million dreams in the fever of late summer, and on into last winter when the light fell meagerly from the sky as though measured out in dirty cupfuls. “Where is she?” he asked. “Did she get looked after?”
Levallois sighed. “I must admit I felt it necessary to step in. The first time I sent Rawls to look in on her she was a week away from eating the leather off her shoes, God help her.” He took his foot off the step and put his hands in his pockets. “Your troubles are now over, Bob.”
Nurse and Rawls listened to the conversation with their chins against their chests as though a certain posture was as good as deafness in the white men’s eyes. George was quiet again, asleep in her arms. If the world was a different place, she would have shaken her head and said how none of it was true, that the girl didn’t have no trouble that the Frenchman wouldn’t add on to quick and heavy enough to knock her on her narrow behind from the weight of it all. She won’t be getting up from that. But Nurse knew she was in the beating heart of Virginia and not that other world, not the one she had begun to go to in her mind, the place where she’d been told a million islands hid themselves above the black water of the Dismal Swamp, and free people lived on them beneath the tupelo cypresses and high white cedars. And in Virginia the truth had not mattered for a long time and would not matter for a good long while yet. The only thing that matters here, she thought, is what people are willing to believe. Lots of dead black folks would attest to that if they were still around to do it. There ain’t no telling the kinds of madness people will believe, but the truth never seemed to Nurse to stand a chance.
Bob, too, was unconvinced by Levallois’s earnestness. Troubles don’t end, he thought. It sounded more like Levallois was reading to him from Reid’s own eulogy. He’s got my old boy toting me around like one of his empty hogsheads. Bob thought of the boy who rifled his pockets at Mechanicsville again. Him putting on the Pennsylvanian’s smashed glasses with a smile like he got them for Christmas. The little dance he danced afterward.
“In a way,” he said, “I’ve felt like a father to her in your absence.”
“Is that a fact?” asked Bob.
“And now,” Levallois went on, choosing his words carefully, “I see that my feelings were misguided in that respect. I no longer see her as a daughter, but rather as a bride.”
Bob instinctively tensed to take on a threatening posture, but the effect produced was only a loud creaking sound from his leg brace and the gray sleeve flapping impotently in the breeze blowing over the windy hill.
“Bob, I’ve thought often about getting word to you so I might properly ask for her hand. But you must trust me. This arrangement is the best for all of us.”
Bob waved his remaining hand dismissively. “You
just fetch my daughter and tell this boy to carry us home. We can talk about the rest of it later.”
“I won’t hear of it, Bob,” said Levallois. “Not with it near dark already. They say there’s Federal cavalry about,” he said. “Emily’s in the overseer’s house nearby. Stay with her tonight at least.”
“Fine. Yes. Take me to her.”
“Good. Good. Rawls,” Levallois said, “why don’t you and Nurse get Mr. Reid set up.” He clapped his hands once, and the sharpness of the sound made Bob jump. Levallois laughed. “It’s a reunion,” he said. “There is nothing better than a reunion.”
Levallois and the minister silently watched the carriage travel down the road between the ornamental cedars until it curved off into open fields and passed behind a stand of old-growth beech trees and disappeared.
“Will we need to adjust the date, Mr. Levallois?” the minister said.
“Reverend, I couldn’t put such strain on Mr. Reid, now could I?”
That night Levallois sent Rawls on an errand back to Richmond. A pretense. No moon as the master of Beauvais stalked the dark edge of the road that led to the slave cabins. Nurse looked out and saw the burning ember of his pipe through the warped window glass of the cabin she soon would share with Rawls. But not tonight. Tonight she smelled the bright and burley wafting through the air as a warning. She went to douse the lamp but passed a window as she did. “A favor, Nurse,” he said to announce his presence. She opened the door and stood in the doorframe. She saw him leaning against a pine in the darkness. A man as seemingly out of place in darkness as in light. His shirt lay sloppily open beneath his coat. The white skin all that trespassed against midnight’s implicit safety. She did not speak.
“I feel like a young man again, Nurse. I feel alive.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” she said. Each time one of them spoke she tried to close the door a little more without making it obvious.
He knocked his pipe on the tree he had been leaning against, the ember extinguished. “Won’t you invite me in?” he said.
“Where’s Rawls?” she asked quietly.
“He’s away. Won’t be back for some time. Such a dutiful man.”
He stepped inside. George slept in a curl of blankets next to Nurse’s bed.
Mr. Levallois did not know how unremarkable he was. But Nurse did. For all his cultivated distance and machinations, he was of a type she knew all too well. An insignificant tooth in a gear that would continue turning whether one broke off or not. She had met dozens like him in her life, and could figure the hundreds and thousands that played the same role all throughout the South. He pretended at sophistication, but his next violence was never more than a whim away, or at a distance closed by some minor disappointment. And she could not say for sure if she or Rawls or both would die by his hand, but she figured whoever’s hand it was would look enough like his as to make no difference. What counted as a blessing in this world made her want to curse God, to dismiss the notion of him with the ease with which Rawls dismissed life’s whole absurd affair. To say, Today will be a hard day, and tomorrow even harder, and leave that as sufficient commentary. But now was not the time for yet. Now she must deal with again. She opened the door. She knew everything he would say and all the ways the hatred of his own flesh would be twisted and forced upon her. He was, like all of them, predictable. Nurse tried to surrender to it, but in the end she struggled just enough to make him eager.
The next morning Bob left his daughter sleeping in the overseer’s house. He limped out into the frost-hardened yard and made his way toward the back acreage, shouting for Nurse, but he received no answer and did not have the strength to knock on every cabin door. When he got back to the overseer’s house Emily was waiting for him. “Get your things,” he said. “We’re going home.”
“It’s not there, Papa,” Emily said.
She had seemed a child when he’d left. As he took her in that morning, leaning against the porch railing and pulling a knit shawl around her tall shoulders to guard against the cold, he recognized how much she had changed. She was nearly sixteen now, and there was a part of him that mistook her despondency for a natural element of maturity. For a moment, he assumed she was speaking in metaphor. “I know this has all been hard on you, too, Emily,” he said. “I want to make my absence up to you if I can. But we’re going away from this place. That man’s not like us. I don’t want you around him if I can help it, and I’m damn sure gonna try.”
“No, Papa. It’s not there anymore.”
She told her father that after his letters stopped coming, Mr. Levallois suggested he be made executor of her father’s estate. The papers were drawn up and signed quickly, in the midst of her grief. He had fed her and given her shelter, and there had been no word from Bob Reid to make her think he would ever return. So she let Mr. Levallois take over, as she believed he would not steer her wrong.
Bob began to say, “We’ll petition the courts. They’ll see the position you were in… ,” but his words trailed off as the true nature of his predicament loomed. Levallois could afford an army of lawyers large enough in size to rival the one Bob Reid had just been discharged from. Everything he had ever owned was now a minor portion of a huge portfolio that a man of Bob Reid’s station would never be allowed to split. He didn’t even have an income, other than a new law passed in Richmond to give out benefits to veterans that he was not prepared to put much faith in. He looked at his daughter and saw that she had been twice deceived. First by him and the Commonwealth, when he abandoned her to go and fight on its behalf. And then by Mr. Levallois, though he did not blame Emily for that. “Help me get the horses. I want to see it.”
“Papa,” she said again. “There’s nothing left to see.”
In the warming morning light, he and Emily rode from the overseer’s house to their old land. In a year the first iron on Levallois’s new railway line to Raleigh would be laid across the same ground Bob and Emily had once called home. As Emily told him how everything had been sold off for scrap, Bob realized that Levallois would never have been able to put the deal together if circumstances had not allowed him to acquire the land as cheaply as he had.
Bob dismounted with his daughter’s help. He walked through the emptiness of his land and imagined what it was to become. Metal, gravel, and pitched ties further burying his wife’s grave. The outline of his daughter’s childhood home still visible as an accidental bed where bluebells and purple phlox thrived among high wild grasses. He stood for a moment in disbelief before saying quietly, “I’ll get it back, Emily. I promise. I don’t know how, but I will.”
Emily looked at her broken father shuffling around the property as though its landmarks were still there, passing instinctively through a space where there had once been a swinging gate. He let himself slump unceremoniously to the ground with his back to her. Emily was humiliated on his behalf. She both loved him and loathed him. His injury and helplessness. And while she did not have the heart to say it to her father, she knew that Mr. Levallois would never give anything back to them but more emptiness.
She was married to Levallois as spring turned to summer. The morning of, Bob Reid looked in his dressing mirror and hardly recognized himself. Nearly a year gone since he’d been wounded at Mechanicsville. On his best days he thought a wagon with a busted axle or a poorly mended stretch of fence could be compared favorably with what was left of him: the leg brace, his empty sleeve, the sum of it all being just another useless and poorly man-made thing.
Emily had assented to the marriage, but she remained impenetrable to Bob. He asked her for strength and had assured her again and again that he knew what he was doing and that this was for the best. Be strong and trust me, he would say. Bob Reid knew it was cruel to lean on whatever strength his daughter still had left, but he knew he had none of his own, or only just enough to quiet the voices telling him to take his shotgun to the barn and paint the haystacks with his brains. What had life been like for her in the two years since he’d l
eft? She did not say when asked and he no longer asked. He tried to give her the yellow kepi she’d admired when he first volunteered, but she’d wept at the sight of it. He obsessed over lines in the letters she’d sent before they’d stopped. Mr. Levallois says…Mr. Levallois says…Mr. Levallois says. Since his return, they’d passed in the overseer’s house like the other was a ghost. A second look to be sure the figure was real, perhaps a shudder and a word to ward it off.
As the wagon stopped in the circle drive before the ceremony began, he reached for his daughter’s hand. Emily looked at him. With a pitiful smile to try to hide her growing resentment of him, she said, “It’s too late, Papa.”
Bob withdrew further into the moody silence Levallois had long since taken for complete capitulation and Emily for further abandonment. He leaned stoically against his brace after they arrived. Levallois waited for his bride where the ancient sycamore still stood. He watched his daughter walk the pebble drive until she stopped across from Levallois and looked timidly toward the preacher. Reid’s only desire in the world was to say to her once more, My daughter, this is for the best. I swear on your mother, if you trust me, I can set this world right. But Bob Reid did not say those words.
She looked down at the ground as the reverend began to speak. Ever so briefly, with one shattering glance in his direction, Emily told her father her world had ended. She was not wrong. Her world was ended. But she did not even know why she wasn’t wrong, didn’t know that her description of the end of something that seemed to her unique and personal was equally true and applicable to the state of things beyond her appropriately petulant complaint. The world was ended. Reid knew this. And he loved her for it; that her insouciant rage and disappointment flooded into the void the world had left behind. The bluecoats on horseback already cantered at its edges. The speculators soon would come to make more valuations and assessments. He looked away from her in shame, and lowered his eyes. What kind of man am I, to give her a broken world and turn around and take that from her, too? And there she waited for Levallois to take her hand, telling the truth in the way we all do best, when we are trying to say something else, when we do not even realize it is the truth we mean to tell.