A Shout in the Ruins

by Kevin Powers

  Mr. Levallois requested that the wedding should begin with a reading from the Song of Solomon. And so the preacher slowly interrupted the silence with words about a dark beauty and a neglected vineyard before ending with a reading from Genesis, proclaiming that those who gathered among those pale summer-lit grasses on the hill were just and righteous among their generations, and so, too, would be all those who followed from this marriage. Finally, he pronounced that Emily was now wedded for all eternity in the eyes of God to Mr. Levallois.

  She looked at her father again and turned away from the deep shame she saw on his face. Her body tensed and she began to feel an increasing bitterness toward the lies the world had raised her to unquestioningly accept. Did she ever have a choice? It seemed to Emily that her whole life had been mapped out already by the minister’s God, or her father and Mr. Levallois, or all the men just like them who insisted the world was exactly as they described. She was beginning to see all the ways that she had been lied to with a new clarity, that they would say anything at all if it made them feel better about themselves. She wondered what it would be like to choose for herself, if it was possible to choose surrender and then claim a secret life that would not be determined by anyone but herself. She watched her father in his great shame, and she was not sure if he even knew that he was living in the lie, too. She was not sure she cared much about the lies other people told themselves anymore. Now she stood alone in summer air so thick it felt like the whole breadth of the sky had been weighed down by an invisible anchor, and she began to feel her fear dissolve. Mr. Levallois was talking to the minister, and her father stood apart from all in his scarcely hidden shame. She would live her own life now. Whatever it looked like to the outside world, whatever circumstances might make up her surroundings, she resolved that she would be the single master of her mind and heart. And she barred the doors to both forever.

  They spent their wedding night in a doomed hotel in Richmond, a city profoundly in denial of the fact that its inevitable ruin had already begun. The sounds of a bread riot a mere three blocks from their room grew steadily louder throughout the evening. “Close the window, please, Mr. Levallois,” she said. There was a knock at their door. Two black men in white coats and gloves served them dinner in their suite, silently attending to their needs in a performance so exquisitely executed that their subservience and decorous manners seemed completely natural to almost every guest who encountered them.

  Levallois smiled, said, “Of course, dear one,” and shut it, flipping the latch closed with a metallic click.

  He took the three steps toward the fireplace and put his hand on her shoulder. She flinched ever so slightly, but then regained her composure so quickly that only someone who expected it to happen would have perceived the loss of it. Her anxiety angered him. He had hoped that on this night there would be a different manner of concession. He had taken his liberties often enough over the years. But now he had a wife, she was his wife, and he expected her to respond with something like passion or desire. No. Her body responded to his touch in the same unmistakable pattern: a tense resistance followed by a kind of recognition, finally giving way to a dull, meaningless surrender.

  Emily had been to Richmond only twice in her life. She found the endless stone and brick suffocating. In a storm she would have heard the water rushing past the piers that held up the nearby railway bridge. But there was no storm. The night was clear and humid and smelled like smoke and sewage and penned horses even though their room was high above the level of the street. She turned to look out the window. The occasional spire above the monotonous brick. A smokestack puffing in the moonlit night. She had been happy once, she thought, before circumstance took her from her solitude and brought her to Levallois. She would be happy only, she decided, if she were ever able to find that solitude again.

  They ate their cold dinner in silence. Levallois built a fire in the fireplace in spite of the warm and humid evening so he would have something to look at other than his young wife. She went into the adjoining room and tried to will herself to do what must be done. It could be said that Levallois began to love her that night precisely because she was further than ever from being one of his possessions. But this did not make her love him back.

  She came out of the room naked. Her gray eyes were illuminated by the firelight, two clouds passing before the moon. “Put out the lamp,” Emily asked. “Please.” She was not afraid of him anymore. And while she did not know what to expect, she told herself she was making a choice. Better the devil you know, they say. His suffocating weight troubled her most, not the pain, and time moved indifferently forward; then and now, here and there, leveling possibility. She shut her eyes and tried to lose herself in the emptiness she felt, but the thought of endless nights and days like this remained. Eventually, she stopped caring whether the lamp was lit at night or not.

  EIGHT

  MERE WEEKS AFTER Lottie Bride’s strange encounter with the amiable old Virginian, she met a man named Charlie Prentis, who would be her husband for the eighteen months prior to her reaching her majority. He drove truck for an outfit called Tar River Freight and had come into the diner a quarter through a long-haul route to Mobile, Alabama, and halfway through a case of Schlitz. They danced in the parking lot at 4:00 a.m., and the emptiness of the mercury-vapor lights at the nearby intersection made them look like ghosts to the drivers of the few cars that passed them by.

  Charlie had been, above all else, an inveterate hypocrite. The same man who after making love with her in the cab of his ’50 Kenworth said, “Goddamn, girl, your mind is on fire. I never seen anything like it,” would also say, when a little further into a case of Schlitz, that she was a no-good half-coon bitch, that there weren’t no such people as the Croatan, and that he couldn’t wait to get out of that backwater and on the road again. The marriage was mercifully brief, ending when Charlie drove his rig straight through a sharp curve above the New River in West Virginia and drowned. His body was not discovered until nearly two weeks later when it was spotted by an executive of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad while waiting for his family to arrive for their vacation. In what would have been considered a very strange coincidence, if not an augury, had it been known by anyone, the shade of purple Charlie’s skin had turned over his ten days in the water was indistinguishable from the color of the bruises he’d left on Lottie’s face the morning he fired up his diesel engine for the last time and drove it toward his death.

  By 1965 she had settled comfortably in a small cottage of three rooms at the end of Pocahontas Avenue in Deltaville, Virginia. She lived alone and would do so for many more years, her brief marriage in her teens having disabused her of the idea that her solitude reflected poorly on her rather than on the world she decided to leave behind after her husband’s death. At twenty-five she took a fill-in job with the post office that landed her in that small Virginia town right out on the edge of America, and her mail route carried her over back roads stitched intricately into the endless coastal woods through which, from time to time, she’d catch a glimpse of the great bay as it unfolded toward the ocean.

  Most of her free time was spent either on her porch, looking out over the gray granite riprap and green water of the Chesapeake, or in her garage, which she’d found to be a more than adequate studio for her art. She worked mainly in oils, reproducing the South that she drove through each day with an amateur’s honesty and a native’s stubborn affection for all its peculiarities and contradictions. Here a black streak on canvas stood in the wide water’s stead, there a dotting of bright color on a gray rectangle looked like the small bands of beach along the bay in summer’s bright light. Many people in Deltaville and its environs had one of Lottie’s pictures hanging in their houses, but few of them felt that they knew her, though with a wave from the window of her jeep, Lottie often left people with the idea that whoever did was fortunate indeed. A long time passed in this way. Many years, in fact. She moved from youth into adulthood, and from adulthood into what s
hould have been the middle of her life. It’s not a bad life, after all, Lottie would have said if asked. Though she was alone, she was very rarely lonely, and Lottie Bride was more or less contented with the order of her days.

  But by the time autumn arrived in Deltaville, Virginia, in 1984, Lottie felt that something was wrong. She thought of the old Virginian more now than she had in the nearly thirty years since those brief hours she’d spent with him so many Junes before in North Carolina. The previous summer she’d met a man named Billy Rivers who owned an all-in-one store in Saluda, where one minor highway splits off from another and heads eastward toward the bay and Deltaville. He sold bait and tackle, a few secondhand guns, cold beer in the working half of a cooler and warm beer in the broke half. He would sometimes fix a busted motor or sagging shocks in the parking lot out back. He was unremarkable, about thirty-five years old, not really good or bad looking; the kind of man you might not notice unless he spoke to you and would still have a hard time describing afterward no matter how long the conversation went. He had a mustache he kept neatly trimmed and a potbelly and was going bald, but he covered his baldness with a blue-and-white Mopar hat, which struck a lot of folks down there as an affectation, though a curious one, as he drove a perfectly maintained Ford F-100, brown in color, with a long bed and a white camper shell.

  She went on a few dates with him after he’d fixed an old beater she’d accepted as payment for a series of paintings for a friend. Lottie thought he was timid and uninteresting at first, but on the third date she realized that he was neither timid nor uninteresting, but in fact was simply listening to her with complete attention, that he found her fascinating and beautiful, and that he seemed content to allow her a glimpse into the life they might share, one in which she could feel the ease and comfort of solitude even when he was with her, only asking that he receive the same feeling back in kind. She knew he had a young son he would not talk about; an ex-wife he was not allowed to see. She also knew that he was kind and gentle and that both of these qualities were anchored to an implacable despair around which his whole being seemed to orbit.

  A few years before he met Lottie, Billy had put the bottle down for good. He had decided to live the way that other people lived, or to at least transform his life into the best approximation of the lives of others he was capable of. This made him a better man in many ways. But it is true that he was a worse man for it, too, in other, less obvious ways, because in his mind his whole life now blossomed from dishonest roots. His wife, Amy, left him. She took back her maiden name, Bartle, and gave it to their son instead of his. She’d become pregnant during one of their last good patches, both of them thinking that by bringing something new into the world they might recover some old thing they had lost. It did not work. She took their son, John, to live in a little rented house on the other side of the James outside of Richmond, an hour-and-a-half drive from the house they’d bought as newlyweds when he left the army in 1971. He thought that if he changed, his wife might stay, but that is not what happened. His changing only made his past transgressions all the more intolerable to his wife, and so she filed a writ against him. When Billy read what she had sworn before the court, he saw nothing he was not guilty of. And even though he and his wife both knew he would not do those things again, he also readily accepted that that fact was not enough to save their marriage. So he made no argument against the writ, and let her escape his orbit the way he supposed a good man would.

  But there was some quality in Billy Rivers beyond what remained unpardonable that Lottie grew to count on by the time the weather turned colder. He had moved his things from the cabin he kept on the Piankatank River to her little house on Pocahontas Avenue only a month after they first met. He was a shy but enthusiastic lover, and when they were finished he would carefully take off his square-framed glasses, fold them up, and place them on the nightstand in an orderly manner, just in front of his wallet. This was all part of Billy’s curiously meticulous nature, common to a lot of ex-drunks, who often keep their constant fear of impending doom when they go on the wagon but add to it a belief that this same doom can be warded off if they arrange their lives just so. He told her he had worn the same pair of glasses since the army had issued them to him in 1968, before which time he had not known there was anything wrong with his eyes. Lottie thought there was a lot to be said for a man who looked after such small things so well, things that most of us treat with indifference and spend a lifetime discarding, and so she forgave him some for his failure to give the truly important things in his life the same attention.

  Lottie did not ask him about Vietnam, though she knew he had been there for two years when he was nineteen and twenty years old. And he did not have much to say about it, except at night, when he would yelp and holler in his sleep. It got to be where Lottie could hardly sleep herself unless his fit had come and gone. Billy’s song, his little lullaby, she called it privately. After a while she began to depend on that as well. She did not say anything to him about his terrors, though she would hold him tightly to her when they came, and sometimes he would wake up after, with Lottie holding him as though she were herself adrift in some terrible storm. She did not say anything to him because she was sure he would tell her the truth if she asked, would tell her anything and everything about his life without a moment’s hesitation. Lottie felt unusually comforted by this certainty, that if the truth is always close at hand it does not need to be said.

  Billy had only been as honest as he was with Lottie one other time in his life. When he was twenty-seven years old he drove to the McGuire Veterans Hospital south of Richmond and asked to see a psychiatrist. He hoped that by driving out to Richmond he would preserve some notion of the safety we very often seek in anonymity. They exchanged small talk, and when the doctor asked him how much he was drinking, Billy cut the figure in half, thinking they could then move on from the subject. He was surprised when the doctor told him twelve beers every day meant he was probably alcoholic. The terrors of the night had not come yet. Billy drowned his ghosts back then. But the terrors of the day were ever present. He told the doctor that sometimes, with a sideways glance in a mirror or out of the corner of his eye, he would see a child burned so badly that its skin came off in black coils, like a snake’s, he said. Or that he very often smelled the burning of man-made things, of people, of villages. And he also said that he felt like he had not killed enough of them gook fuckers, or not the right ones anyway, and what the hell was he supposed to do about that? The doctor asked him if the hatred in him made him afraid. “I don’t hate anyone. I don’t feel anything at all,” Billy replied. “That’s what scares me.”

  “And why does that scare you?”

  He didn’t answer. A man who can’t hate can’t love is what he wanted to say, thinking of his young wife, Amy, how he knew she deserved better than what he could give her, and that he did not think he was capable of giving her anything but far too large a share of his pain.

  “How long is it gonna be like this?” he asked instead.

  “How long is it gonna be like what, Billy? Talk to me.”

  “This,” he said. “You know. All this bullshit.”

  “Oh,” the doctor answered. He leaned forward, crossing his legs and putting both elbows on his knee, his hands tucked up under his chin. “Forever, Billy. It’s gonna be like this forever.”

  He felt a little better when he left, though that wasn’t saying much.

  Lottie and Billy got looks sometimes when they went inland, to Tappahannock or to Richmond. It wasn’t much of an issue farther out on the bay, because according to Billy watermen divide the world up differently than other people, into watermen and everyone else. Other divisions have to be learned. And anyway, even in Tappahannock or Richmond, most folks would decide she must be Mattaponi or something after a few minutes, even if to them she might look like a light-skinned black girl at first, a nigger in the woodpile, at least, they’d tell themselves, and then they’d let them be. Lottie was forty-three y
ears old when she met Billy, ten years older than he was. And she had learned things by then that Billy didn’t know, would perhaps never really know, one of which was that people were going to make decisions about them without any input from either Lottie or Billy, as people generally don’t want your own ideas about your life clouding their thinking when they are making up their mind about you.

  The weather was remarkably warm a few days after Christmas that year. They had a routine by then, which the sunshine and a high of nearly eighty degrees happily upended. Lottie would work most of her days off in her garage studio, and Billy would get into his immaculate truck in the morning before she woke and drive out to the shop in Saluda, where he’d spend a few hours making small talk and occasionally a few sales. At around three in the afternoon he’d drive back to the little house on Pocahontas Avenue, make sandwiches and coffee, and wait for Lottie to take a break and join him. They had two tattered nylon folding chairs set up above the riprap for when it was nice, and Lottie would laugh until she wept when Billy would say, casually and without self-consciousness, “Let’s dine alfresco, then,” because sometimes the funniest thing in the world to her was Billy putting on airs, which he did not do often, and anyway did only because he loved her more than he would have thought possible when she laughed and he did not mind at all if she sometimes laughed at him.

  If it was cool or cold they would sit on the screened-in porch on Adirondack chairs that Billy had made, with a little kerosene heater going between the chairs. Lottie had begun a new work at the end of summer. She did not say anything to Billy about the specifics of her art and he did not ask about it other than “How’s it going, darling?” Whatever she replied, he always seemed to know the right thing to say. If she was frustrated he would encourage her; if she was excited, he would say very simply, “Good. That’s real good.” Billy did not know or care very much about art, but she didn’t need or want him to say anything else because he knew she had real talent. He knew this about her because he had heard her say it once, though she said it in a manner that had no relationship to arrogance, only as a fact she wanted to convince herself of, one that slips away too easily if left unmentioned, the way one might say, below the breath, Thirty days hath September. So he had no reason to doubt her, because in all the time they had together there were no lies told in the house on Pocahontas Avenue.