A Shout in the Ruins

by Kevin Powers

  Rawls, too, was unsteady on his feet, but he had let the ground show him its firmness over the years. Most people hardly noticed his strange shuffling gait anymore. Now he felt the pine needles underfoot, fallen so close to where all of it had happened. He felt the soil, too, and underneath the soil the dark red clay, and farther down the rock that had been the floor of a great sea. It steadied him. It lifted him up. He spun his hips and he felt rooted to the earth. He pulled his tobacco knife from the waist of his pants and swung with such force it made a wind that shook the snow from the pines. He buried the blade in Levallois’s skull. It stayed there as the man fell dead.

  John watched the moon recede in the sky above Beauvais. He walked to the shed behind the overseer’s house and got a pick and two hoes and threw them over his shoulder. He walked down the hill and over the wide lawn and up the stone steps to the house’s ornately carved oak doors. He put the pick through the door handles and barred the front. He went to the side of the house and did the same with the first hoe and then to the back with the second.

  A quarter mile of ground lay between the big house and the overseer’s place, but he crossed it quickly. The snow on the ground reflected the heavens, and the world seemed unusually bright to John, though the sun would not be up for a while yet. He listened to his footsteps and watched his breath form out in front of him in the cold night. He got back to the shed and found that he could tote three casks of coal oil in one go if he made his arms into a hoop and let the top cask sit tightly up against his chin. The first three he put at the farthest corner of the house and after three more trips it was well past midnight and his arms were tired.

  She said to light the fire before sunrise when people were still asleep but not to worry because it would just be a big fire and no one but Levallois would be in there. He went to each corner of the house, put the torch to where he’d left the casks, and waited for the coal oil to get going on the cladding. He did not know how long it took for the fire to burn the way that Emily wanted, but it was a big fire now.

  The flames illuminated the better part of Beauvais in the remaining night. The laborers came out to the wood line to watch. Fire shot up from the gables and hung from the high windows like the tongue of a man dying of thirst. John stood away from the flames, and the little snowdrifts disappeared and melted back from the house and left a blank circle of snowless grass. He heard things sizzle and pop inside, the shattering of glass. Soon there was nothing left for the flames to break. Fire makes a terrifying noise, thought John. It reminded him of crying children.

  He walked back to the overseer’s house and sat on the porch to wait for Emily. She had ridden away and said she would return, but she had not. Nurse and Rawls passed by on a buckboard. He waved to them. They looked at him but said nothing. He watched the brindle pony pull them away from Beauvais.

  Rawls snapped the reins at the pony. George crawled from underneath the blanket they’d tucked him in for sleep. Nurse grabbed him and placed him in her lap. She put her arms around him and kissed his head. He stared at the fire. She took his head in her hands and turned it away from the flames. “Look away, George,” she said. “Look away.” And so they departed from Beauvais just as the sun broke the horizon to the east, in the first month of that New Year, on the second day of that first month; and in the darkness of that day they went out from Beauvais in the sight of all who watched it burn.

  Three days later they reached a crossroad outside the town of Suffolk, Virginia. They could feel the nearness of their destination. Calm brown water stretched out beyond the flat fields. There was no snow here. The winter sun hung high in the cold blue sky. Tall white cypress trees stood with their roots beneath the water and there were islands dotting the distances beyond them. They turned the buckboard down the southeast spur of the road and drove it about a mile before a group of men emerged from the tree line and blocked their path, but one was not a man.

  He looked to be a boy. His skin was pocked and his hair was the color of wet sand. His skin was also gray as were the coats the men wore and as were the boy’s eyes like two dirty shards of ice behind his glasses. One of the lenses was cracked in a pattern that transfixed Nurse. He held a big curved knife in his left hand. The urge to look away from him was so strong she struggled terribly to hold his gaze, but she did hold it. They looked to Nurse like living ghosts, as if they had forgotten to stay down in their graves.

  “Why you giving me that look?” he said.

  “We just want to be on our way,” said Rawls.

  “Well, come on, then,” the boy said. He spat on the ground.

  “We ain’t bothering nobody. We got no business with you.”

  “I don’t much care one way or the other,” the boy said.

  Rawls pulled Levallois’s gleaming pistol from his coat and pointed it at the boy. He pulled the hammer rearward and the cylinder shifted to the left, settling into place with an unmistakable sound.

  The boy stared back at him. He worked a big rub of tobacco around his mouth and spit on the ground again. He did not seem to see the pistol at all. His companions spread around him in a ragged line, blocking the narrow road.

  “You know what that is?” asked the boy.

  Rawls didn’t answer. He held the pistol as steadily as he could and kept it leveled between the two dirty lenses of the wire-rimmed glasses the boy wore.

  “That’s a showpiece. Can’t hurt no one with that. Bigwigs give them out to folks so they can feel like they might do something with it. But it’s just for show. Folks want to feel like they got a say in this world, so other folks give them the feeling, but they don’t give them the say. Can’t do nothing with a gun that shines like that but sell it or use it as a doorstop.”

  Rawls knew the boy was telling the truth, but he did not want it to end like that, so he pulled the trigger. The hammer fell with a click. Nurse flinched at the sound and so did a few of the men standing beside the boy. But the boy did not flinch. And Rawls did not flinch either.

  “See?” the boy said.

  They put up a fight. And Rawls was good and strong and so was Nurse. But they were few and the others many. In the end it did not take long. If only they could have faced them one by one, and name by name, but that is not what happened.

  The boy took off his glasses. He whooped and yelped. He danced his dance.

  FOURTEEN

  IT WAS HARD to tell when dawn broke the day after the fire. Beauvais smoldered and its smoke filled up the winter sky, as if answering the fire that burned through Richmond the year before. Emily Reid Levallois stood in a distant tree line and watched as the same colonel who had come to Beauvais at the end of the war picked through the ruins of the house. Two Federals pulled her husband out of the pines near the workers’ cabins and loaded him onto a cart. His shirt was stained the color of rust, and his limpness left little for her to doubt about his condition, but she did not know why he hadn’t burned inside Beauvais.

  She saw John Talbot on the porch of the overseer’s house, shackled feet and hands. Though Emily did not know it, he was sitting in the same place that he had been found watching the fire when the soldiers arrived. She looked toward the kitchen house and then toward the stable but did not see any sign of Rawls or Nurse or the brindle pony Rawls rode or her daughters either.

  She had expected her plan to set her free. But she had never understood the meaning of the word until that morning, when the world revealed its inevitability and indifference to her, and she realized that her illusion of control was as impermanent as the ashes of the house now being sown over a thousand acres by the winter wind. An enlisted man with a shovel shouted to the colonel, and when the colonel arrived they sifted through the ash and removed a small, fire-blackened skull from the rubble. Emily sank to her knees. She wondered what would happen if she walked out of the tree line and feigned ignorance. Surely they were looking for her, if for no other reason than to see if she was among the victims of the fire. Emily did not know what happened to her husba
nd; that was the truth. What story could she tell to undo what she had done? She watched the soldier pull another scorched skull from the fire. She tried to reconcile the small bones with the pale blue eyes the bones once held, eyes that had stared at her with an innocent and uncomplicated love, but she could not do it. She lay down in the wet leaves and buried her face in her arms, reckoning with the finality of what she had set in motion, and wondering if her father had unraveled like a use-frayed rope because he realized that some wrongs can never be set right.

  A woman’s face appeared before her through the trees. Emily recognized her but did not know her, except that she had been at Beauvais as long as she could recall. “Everybody’s looking for you,” the woman said.

  Emily had nothing to return to and nowhere to go. “Don’t tell them I’m here, please… ,” she said.

  The woman heard her falter, searching for a name as she asked to stay hidden. “You don’t know my name, Miss Emily, do you?”

  “Please,” said Emily.

  The woman looked at her with a mixture of pity and disgust, then shook the branches and began to shout, “I found her! I found her! She’s been hiding in these trees!”

  Emily pulled herself up and ran toward the gray horse she’d left tied deeper in the woods. She turned the horse and mounted it and rode off, looking back only once to see the woman still shouting that she’d been found.

  A week later John Talbot rode to the gallows in the back of his own cart. He sat on a plain pine coffin that he had fashioned himself from a loblolly felled out by the ferry landing. The colonel drove the cart, and a sergeant sat next to him. They allowed the dull boy to go unshackled to his hanging. They rode in the cart toward the courthouse, and a crowd gathered at the edges of the road along the way.

  A New York paper sent a young reporter to cover the trial, as news of the bloodshed at Beauvais Plantation and the nearby train station had scandalized the Eastern Seaboard. He said the jury foreman later told him the jurors were “all farmers from around these parts, and when one of our animals goes crazy, we shoot it.” But they were crazed themselves as they watched the cart take the killer John Talbot to his death. The colonel had looked for Nurse and Rawls but gave up quickly. John Talbot told him they had nothing to do with that night, that he alone had done what Emily had asked him, and the colonel did not look for a reason to disbelieve him.

  John Talbot was tortured with guilt when the nature and extent of his crimes were finally and clearly explained to him. He had done what had been asked of him, and she had not come back as she had said she would. He knew what that meant, and knew it down into the depth of his being, and this disordered his mind, shattering it like a poorly made cup. But still he slept at night. And though he seemed to some to have taken on a ghostly carriage in those last days before they strung him up, gray faced, his body moving with the slightest perpetual vibration, his gray eyes turned upward toward the sky in manner and color not unlike the smoke of a doused fire, that may only be because we will take any image and twist it into the thing we want to see.

  John asked the colonel if he thought that Emily might come.

  “I don’t know, John,” he said. In a way, he pitied the boy, and his thinking that if the girl came the world would have a chance at making sense again. But there was a kind of envy in him, too. The boy believed that it was possible. To make sense of it. To turn it over in your mind and discover that its mechanisms have an order to them. Maybe you could place the tip of your finger on the tooth of a gear and follow it as it turned. And you could see what else might move. And maybe if you looked very carefully at all the turning gears you could get back to the first one, to the first movement, the one that set all the rest in motion. But he had begun to doubt the world really worked that way. After sifting through the ashes of Beauvais, his certainty about the usefulness of order seemed grotesque, and he wondered if mankind might be immune to it by nature.

  “The damnedest thing, Colonel,” the sergeant said.

  “What’s that?” asked Tom.

  “All this savagery out of nowhere.”

  “I don’t think that’s where it comes from.”

  They arrived and got John ready.

  “You want the mask or no?” the sergeant asked.

  “No, sir, I’ll keep my eyes open.”

  “He’s a light one, Sergeant,” Tom said. “He’ll need the long drop.”

  “They don’t have the rig for it, Colonel. It’s about three, four feet.”

  They tied weights to John Talbot’s ankles. He could barely get up the steps without their help. The crowd was restless, their cheeks flushed with blood.

  The sergeant moved toward the lever, but the colonel waved him off.

  “I’ll tell her you were asking after her if we find her, John.”

  “All right.”

  Tom pulled the lever. John Talbot fell out of the world.

  * * *

  The colonel did not find Emily, though he used all of the resources of his office for the balance of that year. No one found her. Normally we would say she was never seen again, but the fact is she was seen many times, though she was never known again by another living soul. Everything that would come to be said about her was true. And the truth has a funny way of making its way in the world. It was here before we crawled out of the sea. And it watched us from the tall grasses when we were naked and wandered the savanna and slept beneath the baobab trees. When there is one man or one woman left on earth, and they have sung their song and sit waiting for its answer, it will be listening. It does not need assent the way we do.

  So yes, they saw her flitting among the Maroons of Great Dismal on their mesic islands, a white face among the black, as straight and slim a figure as the swamp’s ageless cypresses. She was a washerwoman at a boardinghouse in Baltimore. She escaped the lynch mob and wound up passing through the two-bit cow towns along the western coast of Florida. And she spent her remaining days leaving tracks along the white sands where the Manatee River meets the blue-green stillness of the gulf. It is not so hard to imagine. The young Emily becomes older. Our certainty diminishes. Every day the same mismatched rows of least and royal terns look out toward a coming storm as small waves roll in and crash against the shore like the inevitable collapse of a trillion minor hills.

  George, too, saw her once, but did not know it. By the early spring of 1906, he had left the Hugginses’ home on the Outer Banks and traveled down to work the land near Tampa Bay. His would be among the first outfits to log the swamps around the bay for mangroves and buttonwoods. It paid good money and George hated to be cold.

  He rented a room in Ybor City. In the warm air of late April, he walked to a park and unfolded his newspaper. The quake in San Francisco. It never ends, he thought. A woman sat on the bench next to his. She was older than he was, maybe fifty or sixty. But George could see that she was still a beautiful woman. Her skin was pale despite the sun, and her eyes were tinged with gray and gold. She spoke. Her voice was clear, but he did not hear the words. He leaned closer to listen.

  The woman continued to talk. The sounds repeated. A litany. He leaned in again. “Are you okay?” he asked. “Do you need help?”

  He did not recognize her, of course. How could he have? We are born forgetting, and our births and childhoods are soon enough dreams we can’t recall. It’s a kindness nature grants us, one of its few, because it lets us believe we are not made whole, that we’ll have some say in the matter, when in fact our ending is written long before our beginning.

  If she told him her name, there would be no spark of recognition, no trip into the past to hear it on the lips of his father. He would think to himself only that he’d always thought that Emily was a young girl’s name. She seemed to not need anyone to listen, and she seemed quite comfortable performing her litany in whatever privacy the little park in Ybor City provided her. But George felt a curious premonition of regret, and so he folded his paper and went over to her.

  She did not look up a
t him, did not in fact acknowledge him in any way. He thought he caught her midway through her procession. He listened to her for a long time. Over and over again the woman said, “You think you’ll never love another thing in this world. And somehow it is there again. It comes from nothing and from nowhere. It comes from less than nothing. How does it happen? It is the only miracle.”

  Acknowledgments

  This book would not have been possible without the effort and dedication of the countless historians who make the preservation of our shared past their life’s work. Though there is not enough space to express my gratitude to every person who has earned it, I would be remiss if I did not thank the following individuals and organizations explicitly. I am deeply indebted to my former neighbor Ace, whose generosity with his time and extensive knowledge of the history of Jackson Ward was invaluable to me, especially his stories of the period before and during the construction of the interstate highway system that so profoundly altered the neighborhood. I am also grateful to the staff of the Black History Museum and Cultural Center of Virginia, who have enriched my understanding of the city and commonwealth where I was born and raised. Many thanks are also due to M. D. Gorman of the National Park Service, whose expertise on Richmond during the Civil War is, in my humble opinion, unparalleled. His knowledge and passion for sharing it were particularly important in my visits to Chimborazo Park and the Chimborazo Medical Museum. To the employees and volunteers of the Library of Virginia, the Chesterfield Historical Society of Virginia, and the Robeson County History Museum, I would like to express my endless appreciation for your work. The resources the aforementioned people and institutions make available to the public are precious, and I suspect that without their efforts this knowledge would be lost. Whatever this book gets right about the times in which the events described take place, it does so in large part because I had their hard work to refer to. Whatever it gets wrong is my fault alone.