A Shout in the Ruins

by Kevin Powers

  “Might do,” John answered. “Sometimes folks say they know me, but I ain’t strong on telling one black feller from another.”

  “You were down at the ferry landing with that old Melungeon when he got killed?”

  “He was gonna teach me how to work the bateau,” said John flatly.

  “I understand most folks took him for a decent feller,” Rawls said.

  John’s mouth remained open. He blinked a few times in quick succession as if waking up, his face otherwise expressionless. Rawls saw the blood caked like rust on the back of his shirt when the boy shifted in the seat.

  “That blood on you from that dog there?” Rawls asked.

  “No. I was down south of here, going about my picking. Feller I come across gets riled up and put the knife on me. Shot the dog.” John turned away from Rawls, gathered the hair at the back of his neck, and showed him the wound the boy had given him.

  “Damn, you wrapped that dog up like a present but didn’t think to put nothing on that cut?”

  “Well, some folks says…”

  “Hush, let me see it now.” Rawls gently traced his fingers over the ugly injury. What had likely been a wound as straight as a surveyor’s mark was becoming ragged. It was hard to tell exactly what needed tending to with all the dirt. Rawls thought the boy hadn’t washed in months, maybe longer, and he smelled like it. He took a rag out of his pocket and wiped the dirt off the back of John’s neck as best he could without aggravating the wound. Here the blood congealed and brought the opposing bits of skin together, there pus pushed the wound apart. “You know you leave a cut like this it’s liable to put you in the ground?”

  “Ain’t never been sliced up before.”

  “I’m gonna get you looked over so as you don’t drop dead a week from now and come back to haunt my conscience,” Rawls said. “And then we’re going to bury that dog.”

  * * *

  Men like Colonel Tom Fitzgerald rarely came to that part of Virginia before the war, but just as Rawls and John Talbot set their last shovelfuls of dirt over the bird dog Emily Reid had affectionately named Champion in her peaceful girlhood, the young staff officer from Fall River, Massachusetts, ducked through the opening of his tent and looked out over the scattered fields and stands of pines beyond the churchyard where he’d slept. A runner interrupted his morning coffee with a message from his higher-ups requesting that he head to Washington immediately.

  Ten years before or ten years after this peculiar time in history, it might have seemed odd to even the most casual observer that a man as young as Colonel Thomas Jefferson Fitzgerald had been assigned the governance of an area as large as the county. The best estimate, according to surveyors, was that he, at barely twenty-two years old, was now for all intents and purposes the single sovereign of 423 square miles of rebellious territory between the James River to the north and the Appomattox River to the south. But such are the peculiarities of history that it did not seem particularly strange to anyone at all that day in late April of 1865 when he arrived by train in the ruins of Richmond, walked from the station into the street to a waiting horse, and began the ride a few hours farther south to the abandoned courthouse that would serve as the seat of his new administration. It did not seem strange to those who saw such a young man riding over the road toward the courthouse, because we measure strangeness not against what used to be or what will happen further out in time but rather against what we are accustomed to. And the residents of the county had known for many years now that if a man was needed for this role or that role, it should be no surprise that he might be very young or very old or very short or very tall. We draw water from whatever well we have, perhaps someone would have said, however small, for our needs can still be met by diminished things, even if that need is order. And anyway, whatever surprise the residents of that afflicted land had left would for a long time be quietly reserved for the fact that anyone still lived at all.

  If any man was suited to this position in the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, it was Colonel Fitzgerald, his superiors had said, for he had always exhibited a most scrupulous and just nature in all things, and wouldn’t it be a harmonious conclusion for him to end the war very near to where he had begun it, those four long years before? On the train south, as the pinewoods outside his window broke from time to time on open field, a ruined farm, and then a bridge pulled down and now nearly built again, he thought about the way that everything that governed him had been reduced to scaffolding. Rules and what would be permitted he could comprehend, so he had stopped investing in the heavy load of right and wrong. Good and bad alike, he had lain down. He could even remember when.

  Like many of his fellow officers, his commission had been given to him by chance, or in Tom Fitzgerald’s eyes, it was given as the by-product of a system operating beyond its capacity. They had marched for weeks throughout the South, destroying anything that could be considered a means by which the rebels could survive. He himself had shot and butchered a dozen hogs, set the lit torch to tobacco fields and houses large and small, hung both Confederates and deserting Federals from the highest branch of the nearest tree until all the land was wasted, root to tip. Along the way many of his companions died, of wounds or sickness or one rising out of the other, and they were often left to expire among the little nubs of the fields they marched through, too sick themselves to remember anything like dignity in death.

  But then they’d arrived at what seemed to be an untouched parcel, a house still stood with grace atop the hill, a line of linens blowing in the breeze like a hundred flags of truce. And the men who remained were set upon this house like an antiseptic. The officer in charge stood with his arms crossed, a mild perturbation on his face as the screams reached out to them from the house. The horses loosed and shot for sport. A teenage girl was stripped to her underthings and chased into a barn where she held off her attackers with a pitchfork while she could. And Tom, trying to find an argument that he could make about the rights and wrongs of war that would survive the derision of a half-a-hundred men maddened by so many years of having all their insight and introspection proved useless and therefore stripped away, settled on this: he said, “This is not permitted, sir.”

  And the officer merely laughed and said, “Go on, Fitzgerald, you go get some, too.”

  Tom, considering for a moment the nuances of the laws of war, finally said, “All right, then,” and put his hand on the officer’s hip, and pulled the man’s pistol out, and shot him in the forehead with it. He had to shoot two other men who were determined to have their way with the girl. When everything had settled down, he said to the men now circling around him like a congregation, “There’s what we can do and what we can’t.” And he nodded to a dozen more who still held torches on the porch. “We have our orders. Burn it. Burn it all,” he said.

  When they left the farm it was indistinguishable from every other they had seen and all that they would come to see, for they were an equalizing force in the world, and the figures in the half-remaining light that they had left behind were dumb with what will sometimes pass for justice on this earth, and poor now, and resigned to suffer like everyone else. And Tom was calm and light and felt he understood his role with a new clarity, and it was exact and pure and without mercy.

  Such were the mysteries contained invisibly within the figure of the man atop the horse, dark haired and plainly dressed, his uniforms stored in the closet of a boardinghouse up north as he made his way down the dusty turnpike to his unseen lodgings in the county courthouse. And he thought, as he pushed the horse beyond a few buildings gathered at a crossroad, that everyone he passed was more or less like him in every way but those that would be visible, and how easy it would be to let those things dictate the way they should be governed. But no, he had had experience, and so had they, and they were just like he was, after all, were they not, but with other rules and customs that they lived by. Who was he to say what should be done with them, or that he would not himself be a
different man if he’d been given different rules? By this time he had gotten off his horse and spun the reins around a post planted in the ground before the courthouse. It was in a sad state of repair. But he reminded himself that he was not here to punish anyone. Perhaps some of them deserved punishment, certainly some did, for if the rules provided for that eventuality one could assume it was because someone would deserve it. But it was not his place to punish them. He was but a vehicle through which new rules would be established and enforced, a preacher of simplicity and clarity, an evangelist for perfect and unchanging order.

  He stepped onto the porch of the modest courthouse. A few simple posts held up the cedar roof. Next door a squat jail protruded from the grass like an accident in granite. His office was simply appointed in a way that he had no fundamental desire to make significant alterations to; a chair and a wooden desk appeared as if made for outsize children, a portrait of Jefferson Davis hung above a rather overly ornamental mantel. Next to a window, another painting, of William Byrd II, hung askew, though it was hard to see clearly in the glare of western light flooding the window the afternoon of his arrival. He was alone. Staff and other functionaries would follow. Teachers were to be hired from among the local population when possible. Disputes of all kinds would be brought before him to be adjudicated. He was the law. And though he had the same doubts all men have about their own abilities, and was perhaps more honest about them than most, he considered this an improvement over what had qualified as the law before: its absence. The portrait of Davis he took down from the mantel and turned against the wall so that he would not have to look at him. The one of Byrd seemed less immediately offensive, and so he left it to look out in bemusement over his attempts to return this county to the nation.

  His first visitor arrived that afternoon. Sheriff Pete Rivers entered his office without announcement, casually dragging an armchair until it was positioned before the desk opposite where Tom sat. Tom looked up curiously from his reading, an assessment of the county’s particulars drawn up for him by a clerk at the War Department. The man across from him appeared wholly unremarkable. A bit fat. Probably twenty years older than himself. His greasy hair gray at the temples under the hat he noticeably neglected to remove upon entering the building. By the time the man rested the entirety of his weight into the upholstered chair and put his feet up on the corner of the desk, Tom’s pistol was cocked and pointing at him from where it sat like a paperweight on the neatly organized stack of documents that had, mere moments before, occupied the full weight of the young colonel’s attention.

  “Shit!” the man shouted, jumping up from his seat. “You gonna shoot me down before you know who I am?”

  “I very well may,” said Tom.

  “I’m the goddamn sheriff of this place!”

  “What place would that be?”

  “Wha–what?” Rivers stammered. “I’m the duly appointed law of Chesterfield County.”

  “Your authority has been revoked.”

  “Hell it has. I have jurisdiction over matters both, over matters…” It was nearly May, and not yet warm, but the exertion of jumping out of his chair compounded with his efforts to recall the exact formulation of his responsibilities had caused him to sweat profusely. “Over matters both civil and criminal.”

  “Had.”

  “What?”

  “Had, I said. Past tense.”

  “Now, sir. Lookit. I’d bet I was the first man round these parts to take Lincoln’s amnesty oath.”

  “I’ll bet you were, too.” He looked to Tom like a man with flexible convictions.

  “And I ain’t never took up arms against no Yankee like you in my life.”

  “I can tell. And I think we can both agree it would have ended poorly for you if you had, evidenced by my pistol ready on this desk and yours sitting in that holster. Just so we’re both absolutely clear, my name is Colonel Thomas Fitzgerald. Lee has surrendered. You are not now the duly appointed law of anything. You are a man living in occupied territory, and if you enter my office armed again, I will kill you.”

  “Some bedside manner you have,” Sheriff Rivers said, sinking into the chair.

  “I’m not here to heal you,” Tom answered. “Get to your business.”

  “I’m just carrying a message.”

  Tom extended his left hand with the palm up out over the desk.

  Rivers saw that there was a slight tremor in both the hand and the young officer’s left eye. The right hand, however, lay relaxed on the table, comfortably within the orbit of the pistol’s wooden grip. He handed over the letter Levallois had given to him to deliver.

  “Thank you,” Tom said, returning the pistol to his holster and using a delicate silver letter opener to attend to the letter.

  Rivers waited for the man to say something else, but he did not, so he turned to leave, pausing at the doorway to say, “I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, Mr. Fitzgerald, but you’d do well to remember something.”

  Tom lifted his eyes slightly above the top of the paper from which he had been reading, annoyed by the disregard with which this Rivers fellow treated his time. “And what might that be?” he asked.

  “Somewhere on this earth,” the former sheriff said, “I’m sure there are people who love you. But they ain’t here.”

  The following day Fitzgerald saddled his horse and left the courthouse in the care of a trusted sergeant. The directions to Beauvais were straightforward enough. Prior to his arrival, he’d made notations on his maps of the locations of the homes of prominent Confederates and important men who would soon fall under his purview, and when the locals saw him seemingly staring blankly out from beneath his broad cavalryman’s hat, none of them could see the purpose in his gaze, that he was amending his understanding of the land and refining the plan with which he intended to rejoin it to the nation.

  He was aware, of course, that he remained at least in theoretical danger. When told that his superiors in Washington suggested he ride out to make his assessments under arms, perhaps with ten or twenty good men, he said he would take it under advisement. Tom did not think there were ten or twenty good men left in the world, and that limiting the pool of candidates to those serving in the army would reduce his chances of finding even one to almost nil. And anyway, he thought, he’d faced rebs who were actually suited to killing and was still standing. So with a soldier’s practical fatalism he decided to conserve his bureaucratic resources for other matters.

  As he rode it occurred to him he had not seen a wild thing run or fly since arriving in Virginia. In his boyhood he would watch the smoke-gray breakers surrender to the wind and die along the stony shores of Narragansett Bay. Once, on a bright warm July day, he’d spent hours watching a humpback breach and dance its way out toward the Atlantic. He stayed sprawled along a shoreline rock until the great beast was far too distant to observe, and stayed longer until night fell. When, finally, everything around him was cool and quiet and blue-black except the stars, he began to weep. He was inconsolable even as winter arrived, though he was not sure why. Sometimes he’d ponder the giant icicles that hung precipitously from the eaves of the textile mills crowding the banks of the Quequechan River, vaguely hopeful that one or more would fall on him. It seems that the creatures of this earth only withdraw from exceptional acts of violence: that of a land surrendered wholly to industry, or war on a scale that is its equal. They are, for the most part, indifferent to its more private and quotidian manifestations that occur everywhere on earth: a nighttime whipping in a lamplit barn, a hand snuffing out a desperate cry behind a bedroom’s locked door. So it must be said that his ride to Beauvais astounded him, filled as it was with the nuthatches’ song, a doe bleating in distress as a group of whitetails sprang erect and dashed into the trees, the cares of every living thing contentedly reserved for the unique harm that each was wedded to from birth. Something revived in him that had been diminished for a long time. When his regiment first headed south what seemed like a million yea
rs before, he’d brought along a journal to record something of the natural world in its blank pages. But nothing was ever recorded, his pen captured no exotic animals, and he had not bothered to describe or sketch the flora that turned late April in the South into a riot of light and color. He came out of the war feeling as though he’d emerged from a dream he could hardly remember. And the book remained marked only by its emptiness.

  And so much still seemed unrecoverable to him. His parents were dead, though he did not know it. They had been buried, over the course of the more than three years he’d been gone, between and among the graves of Portuguese immigrants who’d died of influenza, hunger, homesickness, or some other fatal condition common to those far from home. Now their matching stones, alike in all but name and dates of birth and death, broke up the regularity of the graveyard’s register: Silva, Almeida, Fernandes, Fitzgerald, Antunes, Reis, Marques. If he’d ever made it back, the colonel might have said that Fall River would never be the same. But he did not make it back; only a few of his letters did. And even these sat undelivered on the desk of the aging postman, who woke from his afternoon nap and opened them, perhaps reading them quietly before the light of his kitchen stove, From your beloved son, somewhere in Georgia or Tennessee, followed by a description of the letter writer’s dreams, Mother, all night long I dream of running but being too slow, or the next from outside Petersburg, Mother, all night long I dream of being caught, of throwing punches with no force, or from North Carolina, Mother, in my dreams it is always dark and my teeth fall out. When the postman read the first of these he began to feel a deep but unspecific sorrow that only increased throughout the afternoon, something to do with, as he would say to his wife that evening, the fact that thoughts like these must ever get recorded at all.