A Shout in the Ruins

by Kevin Powers

  TEN

  GEORGE POINTED OUT the way to Lottie the best he could. The car complained about the bumps and ruts in the road the whole drive east toward Lumberton. He had only flashes of the old life he’d left behind to draw on. But there was such familiarity, too. The smell of a place never changes, he thought, and somewhere deep in his being he felt the dark waters return to him, and the moss hung like garlands from the cypress trees as if to welcome him. They drove along old washboard roads he thought he recognized. He whistled. High summer light still fell between the leaves. “We’re out back of behind now, girl,” he said. His wheezing had gotten worse during the storm that passed over as they left the theater.

  “You okay, Mr. Seldom?” Lottie asked.

  “It’s just the weather.”

  They took wrong turns, running into dead ends that dissolved into the fringes of the swamps, and while they searched, the sun set over the black river through the trees. Hours later, the moon hung full and bright in the cloudless night. “It’s got to be nearby,” George said. They sat for a while on the side of another back road with the car idling, and when they drove on, he asked her to turn the car down an overgrown path. The wheels followed along imperfectly in grooves as deep as wagon ruts. They reached the trail’s end, and before them in the car’s high beams stood a cabin in the depths of disrepair. Lottie threw the shifter up into PARK on the steering column. George opened the passenger door and she came around to help him out of the car.

  “Is this it, Mr. Seldom?” she asked.

  He stared at the place and nodded.

  More than seventy-five years had passed since he’d seen it. The years had made their mark on the place. A home requires living in to deserve the name. It is as if shouts and reconciliations provide a barrier against both time and weather. For a floor to truly be kept clean, the stomping of a child’s bare feet must dirty it first. A porch roof caves in more quickly when there is no one to sit beneath it waiting for a loved one to return. And this cabin had missed all of those happenings for many years.

  The door was buried under the remains of the porch. They walked around it, looking for a place to enter, but could not find one. The walls tilted precariously. The roof had several holes in it. George saw buckets full of moonlight pour through them when he cupped his hands around his eyes and peered into one of the last windows to have glass within its frame.

  George walked back to the front of the cabin, wheezed again, and sat heavily on a tree stump in the cleared dooryard.

  Lottie went to him and put her hand on his shoulder. The old man began to cry. All his anger and disappointments seemed as though they meant to shoot out of his body, from every pore and every angle. The old man shook desperately. In that moment George thought his whole life had been a failed effort to guard against the grief that came for him now. Something summoned him. Lottie knelt on the ground next to him and wrapped her small arms around his waist. She did not talk. George felt her arms around his waist and it was hard for him to tell if she was pulling him toward or away from whatever it was that called to him.

  All the rooms in the crumbling building of his memory began to reconstruct themselves. He heard his own voice, higher pitched and unweathered by time, echoing through the tumbledown house. In his mind it was still the nineteenth century, and in that century he wept and raged on his bed. The woman tried to console him but could not.

  “Who is my father?” he asked her.

  “I don’t know,” the old woman said.

  “My mother?”

  “It’s hard to say, though I know that she could read and write. She was probably very beautiful, as you sometimes have a look about you that I am sure belonged to her face first.” She was on her knees behind him, rubbing the back of the boy who had been left to her an innocent, and who now felt an intense, pitiless confusion, surely a close relative of experience and grief. “George,” she said, “someone loved you very much. Just as I do. Enough that they cared for you more than themselves.”

  “How do I know he was not a bad man?”

  “I can’t promise you either way. But what I know is that it’s common for a good man to be fatherless. There are times when a young man chases something in his father, and the chasing turns him bad. They aim themselves at the world like a rifle. But you won’t have to chase that thing. You have been loved so well, and by so many, even if it is beyond your recollection.”

  It was true, both that he was loved and that he would not have a single thing to chase. He left the house and never returned. And he never again saw the woman who raised him. As he walked away from her that day, leaving behind the moss in the cypress trees and the black water of the Lumber River, he had no place at which to aim himself. So instead he searched, not knowing that what it was he hoped to find had been there always, at times still tasting the river’s bitter tannins in his mouth.

  He came back to Lottie. He gently pulled her hands from around his waist and stood her up. “I’ll be all right now, I think. Woman who lived in this house loved me better than anyone I ever knew, but it was too late to tell her that I knew it by the time I knew it for sure.” He did not know why, but he thought the girl might have answers to his questions. “Is that a terrible thing?” he asked the girl.

  “I don’t think it is,” she said. “I think maybe sometimes a thing is so true its being said don’t make a difference at all.” Lottie did not know what made a person good, or if she was such a person herself, but it seemed to her that if this man was not, then we ought not use the word anymore. She recalled her mother scolding her earlier for insisting on involving herself in the man’s life. And now she stood before him, a little afraid of what was happening, but the fact that George did not seem scared gave her some comfort. The old man remained on the stump. She was not sure if he had heard anything she’d said. She desperately hoped he had heard her, and though she felt with an unusual certainty that her mother and grandmother would be disappointed if he hadn’t, she did not say those things again. His head leaned down. He began to breathe heavily, but with diminishing returns. Each time he exhaled, he breathed out more than he had taken in. Or so it seemed to Lottie. She did not know how long she stood there. She felt hypnotized, but then awoke.

  As he left, George’s grief for himself was replaced by a grieving for the world. He felt as though he knew all the names that had come before him and all that would follow. He put the names on his breath and with each exhalation he said them in a language beyond speech. Lottie folded her hands into the shape of a cup and she put the cup under his mouth. He exhaled once more, and filled the cup. Lottie let the silence surround her. George said all the names and then was gone.

  ELEVEN

  ANYONE NEAR THE boundaries of Beauvais Plantation, as April turned to May in 1865, would have seen the passing into history of ten thousand things. Things with names that had been carried all throughout the indifferent progress of time. But winter had returned to the county like a guest who had forgotten her coat, and a cold rain fell, and a gray mist pressed up against the trees aligned in windbreaks along the road. And the road, too, lay obscured in mist and rain, so even those who traveled on it might have missed the reliability of its direction, as if all sense of time and place had been obscured by some premonition of smoke that slinked over the grounds. They might miss each thing as it transformed into ash and disappeared, miss the way that names were left behind without anything to carry them, or a reason to be carried.

  The weather had turned quickly, and Colonel Tom Fitzgerald seemed to bring it with him to Beauvais when he pulled his horse’s reins and turned down between the rows of cedars toward the house. Nurse was under a stable eave to stay dry. She beat the little ones’ dirty nappies on a washboard and watched him come. “You see that man riding this way, Rawls?” she said.

  Rawls was under the eave, too, and he had been happily watching young George toddle about despite the weather. The Levallois twins lay napping in a wicker bassinet that Rawls and John Talbot had
built for them the previous week, and Rawls reached over to set the bassinet rocking, always thinking that the girls must be sickly, their skin such a fragile-looking color, not even a color, really, with eyes so big and blue that he was afraid they might go blind at any moment and Nurse would be saddled with the blame. “I do,” he said.

  The man approached and then stopped his horse. Rain fell down the brim of his hat in curtains that obscured his face. Rawls saw the butt end of a big pistol hanging out of a leather holster. The holster seemed well worn and so did the saddle and the tie-down martingale, too, and Rawls had the impression that the man would also appear thoroughly broken in if he could only see his face well enough to say for sure. Rawls stilled the gently rocking bassinet with his hand. Nurse set the washing down. The man spoke softly, and in the racket of gray weather he was hard to hear, so Rawls stepped to the edge of the eave of the stable roof where the rain fell in a great sheet between them. He made sure to place himself between the children and the rider.

  “This is Beauvais,” the man said.

  It did not seem to Rawls that the man was asking, but by the way he lingered on the horse in the rain, Rawls decided he was waiting on an answer. “It is.”

  “Tell me. What’s he like, this Levallois?”

  “I don’t know that I can tell you more than anyone else could,” Rawls said, suspicious of the man’s intentions but certain that Virginia was not yet a place where he, freeman or slave, could keep his opinions to himself when asked about them.

  “Nevertheless. You are the one I asked.”

  “He’s the boss around these parts.”

  “Of this place, you mean?”

  “Sure, this place. But he’s got interests all over.”

  “All over the county?” the colonel asked.

  “Yes, sir. Most of the fields. Big stake in the mines. The niggers in the fields. The niggers in the mines. White folks in both. The store. The station. Railroad what going in a little south of here.”

  “Is he a reasonable man?” asked the colonel.

  “I don’t claim to know the workings of his mind,” said Rawls.

  The colonel dismounted and tied the reins to a post holding up the eave under which Nurse and Rawls and the three young children were staying dry. He introduced himself to both of them. Nurse rose and curtseyed and he shook Rawls’s hand and did not acknowledge the young ones. He told them he was with the U.S. government, and that things were going to change down south.

  “From what to what?” Rawls asked. He was not often in the position of asking white men questions, and so he made room for the man to come under the eave to get out of the weather, but the man did not.

  “We’re going to be one country again,” he answered Rawls.

  “That’s a nice thing to hear, but I don’t think most fellers will notice.”

  “Yes. I suspect there might be difficulties,” he said. “A lot of rebels came out of Chesterfield. But where a man comes from never meant much to me. I killed graybacks by the cartload no matter where they were from, as I was told to do. And now I am told to make sure things go as cordially as possible.” Tom could not always recognize how worn and tattered his sense of decorum had become. He had not meant to offend the woman, and said so, and Nurse and Rawls looked at each other as though they might laugh, but they did not.

  “We are grateful for you,” she said. She meant her words of gratitude toward the man standing in the rain, but she also meant that very often the world is cruel, as he must know, and decorating the world does not disguise its cruelty; it simply digs its foundations deeper. She had once told Rawls of the night at Chimborazo when she dreamed of the endless line of lanterns headed out toward Oakwood Cemetery, how she had dug the graves herself. And Nurse did not think that she had dreamed of this man, standing right in front of her. Yet here he was anyway, telling her without adornment that what she’d only dreamed of, he had lived.

  Tom felt a great shame come over him when he described the change in his instructions. He thought evil men ought to be killed. The deaths of evil men were worthy of celebration. And weren’t these rebels evil? He had seen the cheeks of their little children flushed pink with rage, the prettily made-up faces of their staid wives turned joyful with bloodlust. And there was precedent, too, for hadn’t God marked Cain? And who had fired the first shot, breaking an injunction carved in stone on his holy mountain? Now they called for reconciliation. Cain would neither wander nor be marked but would sit right down again at the table and ask you to pass the jam. Sometimes Tom allowed himself to think it wasn’t right. But it was dangerous for him to think this way, as his grip on himself was only strong when it reached out for order, an order that had more in common with a river carving a path through a valley or high mountains turned forever into dust. An inevitable order, rather than one invented by old, fat cowards who put the world together like a puzzle in their wood-paneled rooms in Washington. He had not heard Nurse speak. He turned away from them, toward the colonnaded porch, and left wordlessly.

  Levallois watched from the window of the library. He’s come as called, he thought. He considered it a victory, as he often mistook inevitabilities for evidence that the world still bent to his will. When the colonel entered, Levallois sized him up. A young man, he thought, and inexperienced. Probably harmless, but worth keeping an eye on nonetheless. He stood to greet his guest. “I’m so glad you’ve arrived safely. It must be quite perilous down here for a man like you,” he said. Levallois could be a charming man when he wanted to, but the colonel was not charmed. Two men have rarely been so distant in their assessments of each other.

  “I’m fine. Your man out there says you have a lot of sway in this county.”

  “Does he now?”

  “You are paying wages, I expect.”

  “I have always valued good work. You can ask anyone.”

  “I will,” the colonel said. “Do you know the duties I have been assigned to perform?” he asked.

  Levallois poured out two snifters of brandy, set them on a side table below the Mercator map, and asked the officer to sit. “I’m afraid you’ll have to be a little more specific. Please. Have a drink.”

  “I don’t want anything,” said Tom.

  “Everybody wants something,” said Levallois, smiling. “It’s customary.”

  “You misunderstand me. I’m not here to abide by your rules. I am here to ensure that you will abide by the law.”

  Levallois poured both brandies into one glass and drank it down in a big swallow. “Ah,” he said, still emboldened by his initial misapprehension of the man.

  And it must be said that Tom suffered a misapprehension of his own regarding Levallois. He looked at the man holding his glass at the rim with the tips of his fingers. He thought that he had seen his type before. It was true. He had seen dozens of them, indolent and puritanical and greedy even for another man’s free clean air to breathe. They were all the same. They dreamed their farms were kingdoms. As if a thousand acres of soybean, tobacco, or cotton, the dirt of which had never touched their hands, could make a man a king. The savages out west had more. Land so vast a man could not tame it in ten lifetimes. The Chinamen had more in their canopied jungles, and birds and beasts resident therein resisting all description. Yet these men always thought that they could dig their furrows into clay and resist a sovereignty so insistent upon itself that it made their protestations all the more ridiculous. He had been that insistence. And it always ended the same way. He would come into their stately mansions and they would talk, not of their families or of safety, but of abstractions. They would spit at his feet and say their honor was inviolable. They would swear no oath; they would make no acts of contrition. Sometimes Tom found it necessary to correct their misconceptions about what they would or would not do, and he would beat them with his fists until it was hard for him to tell if he was wet with their blood or his own sweat. He would take them outside to where the slaves were gathered, it almost always happened the same way, and he w
ould say to the assembled crowds that they had been free people since the first day of 1863, and if this man had been a master since, then his crime called out for remedy. Silence followed, but once encouraged they would shout, “He whipped us against that cart,” or “He shot Ed Jackson and let him rot nearby where the horses drink.” Some variation on these themes. Tom would split the differences between them. In Georgia he dragged a master from his bed and hung him from a barn’s crossbeam, his wife and little children begging for God’s mercy. In Tennessee he shot one dead on his porch so the now-free people could see that what they had paid for in blood many times over would be repaid in kind. He would burn the big white houses down before he left, and a song always followed him.

  But he was wrong about Levallois. He was of that type, but there is such variation within every category that they lose their utility much more quickly than most people imagine. “I took the oath already,” Levallois said. “I’m not a planter anymore. I’m a businessman.” With that, his crimes had been erased even if his sins had not. Now what he owned was not restricted to the boundaries of Beauvais. What he owned crossed those boundaries as if they were not there, and his property was no longer tied to any particular piece of ground but resided in a hundred different ledgers in a hundred different offices in a hundred different buildings in a hundred different cities, north and south. And so his pardon lived in all those places, too. “We’re one country again,” he said. “Won’t you have a drink,” he asked again. “After all, we only want what’s fair.”