A Shout in the Ruins

by Kevin Powers

  Tom caught a glimpse of a boy outside the house carrying a rake. For a moment, he had mistaken the rake for a rifle and he followed the boy with his eyes, uncharacteristically turning his back to the seated man as the boy walked out of view. “I don’t think you want what’s fair,” the colonel said. “To be fair I’d have to leave your world a ruin. Justice will have to do instead.”

  “Equality under the law,” said Levallois. “That’s all anybody down here wants. And peace. We get the papers, too. We’ve heard how vengeful the Grand Army has become. Fair treatment. Nothing more.” He could see he’d made the colonel uncomfortable. And while Levallois frequently depended on the advantages a man could find in the discomfort of others, he also knew how delicate a thing like discomfort could be.

  Tom could feel himself trembling with temptation. It was as if Mr. Levallois was courting him, seducing him to act as he would have when the war was still on. His mind called to him through his rising anger, resisting the takeover of instinct and urge that he knew would soon be almost irresistible. But the voice in his mind called louder, and in an instant the colonel recognized he had allowed himself to be caught back-footed. He turned around quickly and saw that Levallois had stood and moved a step toward him, his hand moving in an erratic orbit around the knife sheathed on his belt. Tom lowered his open palm toward the back strap of his New Army Colt in a deliberate and precise trajectory.

  “An unequivocal man, I see,” said Levallois, raising his hands as if to indicate he was being misunderstood.

  “Life’s less complicated that way.”

  Levallois moved the marble table from between the two chairs and sat back down. He put his feet up on the chair opposite him and folded his hands over his belly. “What’s this talk of ruin? It has no place in the modern world. What do you think we’ll do if you leave us with nothing? All men have needs.”

  “You can have your memories.”

  “That might be worse for you than you think. But still you believe you can come down here and rub our noses in shit like misbehaving puppies? It won’t work.”

  “That doesn’t mean you don’t deserve it.”

  “You’re right. It doesn’t mean that. But it still won’t work. Colonel, I was born in Virginia. I’ll die in Virginia. I don’t concern myself with right and wrong as they exist somewhere out in the ether, or in goddamn New England or wherever you come from. I’ll do what’s right for me and mine, right here, where I live. And so will everyone else, you included, where they live. Nothing changes but the names we give to things. You want to have a debate about justice? You’re a young man yet, Colonel. Open your eyes. Tell me what it looks like. Come back in five years, in ten, in a hundred, and tell me what you’ve accomplished. In the meantime, I will take what I need.”

  “You will take what you want.”

  “You act like there’s a man anywhere on earth who can tell the difference.”

  * * *

  Emily had seen him coming, too. She was in her bedroom, where she passed most of her time now. She was not imprisoned. She was forgotten, but the results were more or less the same. Levallois had lost interest in her quite quickly after the wedding, his attentions almost exclusively reserved for the new railway line and the station being built atop her family’s former land. And though she began to despise him almost as quickly as he seemed to forget her, his indifference inflamed her contempt more intensely each passing day. It transformed, until it and her disgust for her father’s weakness and abandonment of her became concentrated into one idea: that the men of Beauvais Plantation were the sole impediment to the life of freedom and isolation she had come to long for. On a few occasions since the birth of her children, she had been forced to perform her wifely duties, though by then she could recognize herself as a substitute for her husband’s true desires and muddle through disinterestedly. But his failures quickly turned to blame and accusation, and though she refused to accept the burden of this blame, this resistance had required a hardening of her heart to such an extent that Emily sometimes found herself surprised to feel it beating still. Even her daughters, helpless and innocent though they were, carried in their eyes the reflection of their father, and sometimes Emily withdrew from them because she could not bear how unpredictable her hatred of them was, these little blue-eyed dolls whom she imagined hissing at her when she turned her back.

  Nurse had seen Emily earlier in the day, pacing the garden, stopping suddenly to place a pale hand over her chest. Her mistress then drew a quick and silent shock of air into her lungs. They caught each other’s eyes, and Emily’s mouth was formed into a delicate circle, as if made from glass. Nurse felt her face mirror her mistress’s, in shock and fear and wonderment, for until that moment she was sure she had known the whole range of terrible emotion. But this was new, and when Nurse grabbed her skirts and turned to leave the garden in a rush, the image of her mistress’s pale eyes stayed with her, ringed with tears quivering like mercury. Nurse was terrified that whatever caused those tears was not merely a sadness she had known herself, but instead the symptom of some unnamed illness that anyone near Emily might catch were they to get too close.

  For Emily, life had become the walking of a post. At night she shuffled through the darkened hallways, as ghostly as a living girl could be, and Nurse soon enough discovered how frightful it can be to wake someone who does not know they are asleep. During the day, for an hour or two, she’d pace the boxwood garden while Nurse kept the children nearby in the yard, until her days turned into a performance. The motions of motherhood. Retiring to her room. A visit to her father for lunch in the overseer’s house, where she’d listen to some machination or theory about how he would set the world right.

  Bob had, with few exceptions, become a recluse, and Levallois tolerated his presence only out of a diminishing sense of obligation to his wife. But Bob had taken to the dullard Talbot. When Rawls first brought him up to the house to tend to his injury, he had raised the notion to Bob that the boy might be some kind of kin to Bob’s deceased wife on account of their shared surname. And this idea, that John Talbot might be a connection to a part of his life he had left in the creek outside Mechanicsville, stuck in his mind the way a saw sticks in timber with a novice at the handle. He revised his past into a holy idyll. Made little plans and designs. And on those rare days when his daughter appeared, he would insist that the three of them take cold drinks on the stone porch of the house the world had conspired to exile him to, where the land rose up a little higher than the rest, and from which place he had watched the fires of Richmond paint a black streak across the northern sky only weeks before. Bob’s pain was still fresh. The wounds, while healed, were not yet a year old. And his discovery of his clever dispossession by Levallois was only a few months in the past. As the weather warmed he filled the air with paranoiac talk. “Their day is coming, Emily,” he would say, again and again. “Yes, Papa,” she would say, dismissing him, as his bitter protestations had long since lost their bite. She did not think her father would know what to do with himself without his grievances. And she certainly didn’t think he would ever try to have them redressed.

  Cause and effect were too complex a set of principles for John. Levallois had been nervous to have him around at first when he saw Rawls tending to the boy’s wound. Levallois was sure he saw a spark of recognition in the boy’s eyes, but he did not see the change in demeanor he expected to accompany the spark. Once he caught the boy’s gaze lingering on the antler handle of his knife. “You recall this knife, boy?” he asked cruelly. John replied that he did. When he offered no further comment, Levallois took the knife out and handed it to him, holding the blade in his palm and letting the carved end come to rest where John Talbot waited to grip it. He looked it over intently, but it did not occur to him to stick the blade right up under Levallois’s ribs, over and over again until he was too tired to stand, and to continue until he had stabbed the man so many times he no longer screamed, until the man just sat there with his arms over h
is knees while the knife went in, grimacing occasionally and bleeding all over the brick floor, blowing out deep breaths as John Talbot punched the knife into his sides. He could have done it quite easily, as Levallois was not afraid of John, and it is easiest to kill a man who is not afraid of you because he’ll let you do it. But this did not occur to him, even though he could recall with great detail how it had appeared when the man had done those very things to Spanish Jim, who had been born before the last century had come in, long before John’s life had been reduced to a riddle he could find no satisfying answer to.

  On some days after sitting with her father, Emily would allow John Talbot to accompany her as she walked the grounds of Beauvais. Being with him was very much like being alone, she thought. She felt unencumbered by obligation in his company. We are most real to ourselves, and surely this has been said before, so perhaps it is forgivable that Emily misunderstood his deficiencies as a kind of incompleteness. Someone else might have said it differently; that while Emily might know she was a child of God she did not yet know that she was not an only child.

  Emily would lead John Talbot through the swinging garden gate and out through the broad green leaves and between the thousand knee-high hills of the tobacco fields. They went sometimes to sit beneath the old sycamore where the new railway line to Raleigh had a stop. Levallois Crossing, it was called, almost now a little town distinct from the rest of Chesterfield. And when Emily took John there, she did not see signs of progress in the steam plume of the engine as it roared and dove backward between the trees along the rails. She saw only that which should be hers, that which she refused to leave no matter how desperately she wanted to escape. Levallois had declared he would drag the whole of the county into the present day, and he had. Her father kept insisting he would make things right. But her father was a wrecked loon. Her mother lay buried in a grave they’d had to put a fence around so that businessmen heading north and south would not piss on it before the conductor called for all aboard. She saw her husband’s lawyers coming and going from the library at Beauvais. How they clutched signed papers to their chests and shuffled out with an urgency that seemed to her ridiculous, as if the ownership of a quarter point of interest could be the thing on which the world depended. And so in those early days after the war ended, Emily decided that the freedom she had secured for herself in the innermost workings of her mind and heart was not enough, and she would never know more than that unless she acted.

  One day, when summer stirred the wet air like a broth, they passed through the woods and into the high wild meadows, John behind her as she darted and zagged through the chest-high grass. Emily was now intensely focused on their destination, and she did not see that underfoot were the husks of a billion wingless nymphs. John noticed, but said nothing, not thinking there was cause to comment on it, though he had never seen a sight like that before that he could recall. He accepted the world as it was quite easily, as his mind created no alternatives for either improvement or diminishment, and so he did not lose himself in frustrated ambitions or the confusions of category. When a man has a choice and yet abstains from the ruination of whatever little piece of the earth he can alter, he is called a good man. If it comes as naturally to him as breathing, we call him a simpleton. But such is life. John rubbed at the scar on the back of his neck. He watched Emily dart into a stand of cedars, and toward the road that led down to the river. When she was out of sight he was struck deaf by a high electric rattle and buzz, and blinded by a cloud of locusts rising from the meadow. It seemed to John that the earth had taken wing as if to flee from itself. He walked through the cloud, parting the swarming bugs with his outstretched hands. They covered him over completely, occupying every inch of the meadow and raising a terrific noise, but he was not afraid. It seemed to John like a kind of music. Their wings beat the air, beautifully. Emily was far away. He did not know how much time had passed. He thought that he would tell her about what he had seen, but by the time he found her sitting on the bank the locusts had lost their novelty, had become but another piece of the common world, and so he did not tell her, and she was not reminded of her terrible dreams.

  She sat on a large rock out in the shallows. John settled onto the bank, hanging his legs over a knot of roots from which a spring flood had washed away the dirt. They had not talked at all. They rarely did. He had told her about the dog after he and Rawls had buried it, even though Rawls had asked him not to. It was hard for him to be dishonest. Rawls had tried to explain to him that sometimes the truth makes life harder for people, and that both the truth and lies come in different flavors. He said you can pardon yourself if you have to hold the truth back on occasion, and since it would be a hard day today, and a harder one tomorrow, why add to the difficulties of another if it could be prevented just by keeping one’s mouth shut? John was sure Rawls was a good man, and he liked his company, and he liked to be asked by Rawls for his assistance on one project or another around Beauvais, but he also was confused by the world he described, and the careful steps one had to take to walk through it. John had no head for lies of any variety. And so he told Emily what had happened to the dog whose name he could not recall, the one that had kept him warm at night while he wandered Virginia, living off its scraps. And he now followed her the way he imagined the dog had, trying to take its place for Emily as if this might be a kind of atonement, always trying to be mindful that he must protect her from harm, like the harm the boy with the broken glasses had brought on him and the dog both.

  Out on her gray perch she watched the slate-blue water course and roil over the midstream stones. Herons dove for shad and barked. She felt John near her on the bank, careless. She felt a great, untapped power circulating through her body, some force that had accrued with every lingering stare that her clouded eyes had caught and turned away throughout her life. And there was nothing more to do but harness it. She had been a dutiful wife. She had listened to her husband. He talked as though he were singularly endowed with the ability to see the true nature of the world. People can be relied upon so well to show you the right course if only you want to see it, he often said. Yes, she thought. That was true. She slipped off her clothes, taking her time with it, and slid into the water. John stared, just as she thought he would. His mouth was open. She asked if he would join her.

  She steered him to a patch of moss on the riverbank after they swam and then climbed on top of him. Afterward they lay together in the grass. John did not talk. Months had passed since his return. She had guided him all the while. Correcting him whenever he said something that was not right, sometimes harshly, but always with a touch or gesture after to ease the sadness that her harshness brought him. He began to see the world the way she told him it ought to be seen, and John felt his life beginning to take a smooth, effortless course, until her ideas about the world replaced the few that had been his own.

  Emily said she was sure that he was meant to find her again. How good it was to have turned the tragedy of their first meeting into the bond they now shared. “I’ll rely on you now, John,” she said. “Levallois is cruel and cold. Look how he treats my father, left in the overseer’s house like it’s a prison. Think of what he did to the ferryman.”

  “To Spanish Jim,” said John. “He cut him up good. I used to look for him even though I remember letting him in the water. I put some right big rocks in his pockets first. The dog was there. But I’d look for him some. In pictures. When I’d find little tintypes and things I’d look to see if he were in the pictures.”

  “Such a terrible man. I can’t bear to think of how it must torment you. To have to see him living so comfortably while you are left with only scraps and memories.”

  John did not know the meaning of torment, but he did not ask Emily, as he did not want her to part with him for not knowing the meanings of words as well as she did. He did not want her to part with him ever again. He wanted to swim with her and lie together in the grass forever. “I love you,” he said.

  She s
miled and turned toward him and put her hand on his cheek. He shivered. Emily laughed. “That means someone has walked over the place your grave will be,” she said.

  “Should I say it again?” he asked.

  “Oh, John,” she said. “You must be careful with that word because it means so much.” How easy it was to lead him where she wanted him to go, she thought. Emily wondered if all men were this way, or just boys like John, as eager and uncertain in this as he was in everything. She thought of Levallois’s weight on her. She worked to hide her disgust. “Sometimes it’s true when people say it and sometimes it’s just a word.”

  John Talbot was confused. Why did she think he would say it if it were not true? “I don’t know what else to call it,” he said.

  “Familiarity,” she said.

  “I ain’t studied that word,” said John.

  She laughed again and John was sure that he did love her. She kissed him.

  “It means that maybe you only think you love me and are really only used to me. I don’t want to think that’s what you mean.”

  “I guess that’s partly what I mean, but the rest, too.”

  “I don’t want it to be just a word when you say it to me, John.”

  “How do I make it so you know it’s true?”

  She rolled away from him and looked up to the crowns of the trees hanging over the river. Out of the corner of her eye she could see that he was racked with thought, desperate to please her but unsure how. She smiled to herself. She clasped his hand in both of hers. Light retreated from them as the sun fell westward. The sky as red now as a slaughterhouse floor. “When love is a true thing, John, you do not need the word,” she said. “You only need a demonstration.”