Jordan County

by Shelby Foote

  John Sturgis, who had a sweet Irish tenor, was a member. He wore tall celluloid collars and needle-tip shoes and drove a buggy to and from choir practice, picking up the other members at their homes and returning them when it was over. The buggy was not really his — it belonged to the feed and grain company for which he worked as a salesman — but it might as well have been, and indeed it seemed likely that it soon would be, together with much more; people were predicting that he would own a share in the business before long. He was forever making jokes and he had a sizable repertory of comic songs in which the characters were immigrant Irishmen whose brogue he could imitate to perfection. With his pale green eyes, his upturned nose a bit knobbed at the tip, his high-colored face and carroty hair, his jaunty manner and whinnying laugh, he was like no one Esther Wingate had ever known. Sometimes when they stood together, singing, sharing a hymnal, his elbow would touch hers. It was like electricity. Sometimes when he took a long note, letting it rise and rise, his face reddening with the rush of blood and his eyes bulging from the effort, she would look up at him, her lips parted in admiration. Then he would break off and smile down at her, his face still red but his eyes no longer bulging, and that was like electricity too.

  It was December, the air frosty; the choir members’ breaths floated in front of their mouths as they came out of the darkened church where the stained-glass windows admitted no moonlight though the world outside was flooded with it. On the homeward ride they sang popular songs — Whoa Emma, The Lost Chord, Silver Threads Among the Gold, I Hope I Dont Intrude — the voices getting fewer and fewer until at last, the Wingate house being the farthest out, there were only three of them in the buggy, Esther and the rector and John Sturgis. The singing would end, and from beyond Mr Clinkscales, who chatted pleasantly in the middle, Esther would watch the young feed salesman, her eyes narrowed with speculation. Sturgis felt her watching him that way, with narrowed eyes; but though he recognized the symptoms — he had had considerable success in that direction, along with his success at salesmanship — he could not quite believe his luck. Besides, Mr Clinkscales was always there.

  He was, that is, until a night two weeks before Christmas, when he tripped and broke his ankle. He was making a genuflection, and when he straightened up, feeling behind him for the step, he missed his footing and toppled backward down the short, carpeted flight of stairs, snatching frantically at emptiness as if for the rungs of an invisible ladder. There were cries of alarm, a flurry of excitement; Mr Clinkscales lay flat on his back with a look of profound surprise on his face and one foot crooked sideways at an unaccustomed angle. He did not know that he was hurt until he tried to stand. Then he saw the twisted foot; “Look at that!” he cried, astonished, pointing downward. The men carried him back to the parish house, where the women helped his wife prepare a basin of hot salt water to draw the pain. The rector kept shaking his head as if he could not quite believe all this had happened. He muttered to himself, his black serge trouser-leg hitched up and his foot in the hot water: “Five thousand times I must have done that in the past five years, at school and all, but nothing like this ever happened. Nothing like this ever happened,” he kept saying, wagging his head with astonishment and unbelief while the women cooed to soothe him and the men stood in the background with long faces.

  So when Sturgis had dropped the others and turned the mare out toward the Wingate house, there were only the two of them in the buggy. The hoofs went clop clop, clop clop, somewhat muffled by the dust of the road. There was a full moon low in the eastern sky. A string of geese went across it, contracting and expanding like elastic — there, then gone, leaving it empty, a disk of burnished gold. Afterwards, at the time of her father’s death and through the weeks of waiting, Esther was to tell herself that it was Providence, their being given the chance to be alone: else why should a man of the church have broken his ankle in the moment of placing himself in the hands of God?

  That was a Tuesday. She did not tell her mother about the rector’s accident. Friday evening after supper the coachman drove her to choir practice; Mrs Wingate was indisposed (this was Providence, too, Esther told herself) and when Sturgis brought her home, having dropped the other singers along the way, her victory was complete. The only thing it lacked was that, as she looked beyond the grain salesman’s shoulder, seeing the big yellow moon now barely on the wane, and felt against her back and hips the little hard round buttons that studded the buggy seat like a handful of pebbles tossed in, Mrs Wingate was not there to watch.

  These were their only two times alone. By Tuesday the rector was onto crutches, and ten days later, on Christmas Eve, Hector Wingate, hard-faced now in his middle fifties — he had gotten so he rarely spoke to anyone, and whoever spoke to him risked offense, either given or received — was killed by a Negro tenant following a disagreement over settlement for the ’77 crop. Thus at last he achieved his heritage of violence; it had been a bloody death, if not a hero’s. The tenant was caught late that night, treed by dogs in a stretch of timber east of town, and lynched early Christmas morning. That was the one they burned in front of the courthouse.

  In late February Sturgis came to Mrs Wingate and asked for her daughter’s hand. Mrs Wingate was in widows’ weeds; Esther stood beside and slightly toward the rear of her mother’s chair. When the young man had spoken, Mrs Wingate’s first reaction was to turn and look at her daughter. Then she turned and looked at the young man. “When?” she asked, almost in a whisper, who had never before been known to lower her voice for anyone.

  “Soon, Mrs Wingate.”

  “How soon?”

  “Soon as possible.”

  She turned again and looked at Esther. “Couldnt …” She stopped and cleared her throat. “Couldnt you wait until your father is decently cold in his grave?”

  They did not reply, but something in their faces — hesitancy and embarrassment, but urgency and certainty too — caused her to pause. Once more she was about to speak and again thought better of it. She made no further objection; she sat looking at the young man, at the carroty hair and the celluloid collar. She did not know that she had ever seen him before, and she fervently wished that she had never seen him at all, certainly not under the present circumstances.

  The fact was she had seen him, although not to recognize. His father, Barney Sturgis, had come to Bristol twenty years before, a widower with three children, directly from Rathfryland, County Down, and had gone to work as a bartender at the Palace Saloon. He worked there still; the Palace was owned by a man named Lowry, who was his cousin and had sent for him. Barney spoke with an Ulster brogue, emphasizing the aitches and the ars. Short and broad-shouldered, he had a florid face, the long, meaty upper lip of the Irish, and bulging eyes. He wore his hair brushed in a damp, neat parabola across his forehead to hide a tendency toward baldness, and about his biceps he wore fancy elastic sleeve garters to keep his cuffs out of the suds. Armed with a bung-starter he was known to be formidable when it was necessary, but it was seldom necessary after the first few times, and his manner was otherwise mild. He would lean forward, both hands flat on the bar, to take an order. This was because he was slightly deaf, but it gave him a confidential air and caused him to have to listen, or at any rate to have to seem to listen, to a great many endless confessions about the secret, troubled lives of his customers. He had never betrayed a confidence; actually, however, that could have been because he heard very little of what was told him. “Is that so?” he’d say, interjecting the words appropriately; “Ye dont tell me.” He was an Orangeman, a Protestant, and had contempt for those of his countrymen born nearer Dublin. It was known that his wife was dead. His life gave him no occasion to speak to women, and he appeared to prefer it so. At least he never remarried.

  John was just out of skirts when his father brought him and his two older sisters to Bristol. He grew up there, leader in school of all the boys within a year of his age and a dozen pounds of his weight. Though he was far from the scholastic top of his class
, he had a quick enough mind and a forthright manner and an instant readiness with his fists; he had never been known to back away from a challenge. In times of excitement he spoke with traces of his father’s brogue, which also earned him a certain respect. Finishing high school he went to work for one of his father’s customers. It was the one favor Barney ever asked in return for having listened or seemed to listen to all those dithyrambic confidences delivered across the bar, and the feed and grain merchant never had cause to regret it. The boy did well, first in the warehouse and then on the road. He was liked and even admired, and now in his middle twenties after six years in the business world he was being pointed to as a man on the way to success, an example of what could be done in that world by a young man who would apply himself, keep cheerful, and not grouse about salary or overtime. There were mothers who preened their daughters for him, considering him quite a catch, and there were daughters who, although their mothers would never have considered him under any account and their fathers would absolutely have reached for pistols at the thought, watched with approval as he rode past in the feed and grain buggy and tipped his hat and cocked his eye.

  No matter what success seemed to lie in his path, however, no one was prepared for his marrying into the Wingate family. “Well!” they said when they heard it, especially the hard-eyed mothers and the fathers who kept their pistols handy. But that was all. It was a time of fever, the first cases; within another two months the dead wagon was making the rounds every morning and they were burying their friends and relatives by the twos and threes; there was little time for comment. Even so, no one was more surprised than Sturgis himself. Marriage had been a long way from his mind.

  There was no proposal, certainly not in any accepted sense, though the request for her hand had been formal enough even by Wingate standards. In the weeks following the Tuesday and Friday evenings when they had had the buggy to themselves he thought of Esther frequently; he would find her coming into his mind at the most unlikely times — in the middle of a sale, for instance, or when he was out with another girl in the buggy. He was rather proud of himself, seeing the affair as a successful sortie into a social group above his own. The pleasure had been small, however, except in this sense, and consequently, though he did not forget her, he thought about her less and less in the course of the two months since they had been together. Then he received a letter, a note. On good stationery, folded precisely and sealed with a monogram in wax, a W looped and scrolled to illegibility, it told him she was going to have a baby, and requested that he call the following morning.

  His reaction was surprise, then alarm, then dismay, then downright fright, all four in rapid succession, each giving way in turn until the fourth, which remained and which he never lost though at first he misunderstood its source, its basis, believing it was fear of Mrs Wingate. He had never presumed even to bow to her from the boardwalk as she rode past in her carriage. Yet now he must go to her with this request, this knowledge; he must climb those steps, cross that high gallery, walk into that house he had never believed he would enter, and face her in that parlor. This seemed as thoroughly presumptuous to him as he knew it would seem to her. Though he had the advantage of strength proceeding from an established fact — Esther was pregnant, and had summoned him — he also had the guilt, and guilt was a burden no man knew the weight of till it was loaded on his back.

  Then in a moment of revelation, the chain reaction continuing, the fright became pure terror, which passed to panic. He realized that it was not the mother he feared; that was just something to hide behind, to conceal himself from himself, from his own thoughts. The one he really feared was the daughter. That Friday night in the buggy, driving back toward the heart of town, his prayers having been answered after the flesh, he had indulged in a daydream, a fantasy in which Esther came to him at his boarding house, and there in front of his fellow boarders told him, ‘I cannot live without you. Marry me’; ‘All right. Gladly,’ he said, and they were married with the approval of her parents and the town; they lived happily ever after, in the Wingate house and on the Wingate money. Yet now that something very like this had occurred — though in fact she had not come herself but had sent a summons, and though the words were not the same — Sturgis did not feel elated; he did not say ‘Gladly,’ or feel it either. He felt fright. For now he saw that behind the demureness and the inexperience Esther was formidable, maybe even inexorable. He remembered the eyes narrowed beyond the chattering rector; “It’s early yet,” she had said, watching the string of geese go across the moon, and when the opportunity came she had not so much surrendered her virtue as flung it from her, and flung it with a shudder not of passion and abandon but rather of revulsion and determination, accomplishing conception in a single connection — as if that too had been an act of will, he realized suddenly. Now that he was confronted with the necessity for marriage there began to be considerable doubt in his mind as to who had been the aggressor in the seduction, if seduction was the word.

  Then too, like any other man, he had had his plans, and they were no less real for being vague. He had intended to hang onto bachelorhood as long as he was able; then would come a wife and a home, small and neat and snugly run, with children and friends who laughed at the jokes you laughed at, and old age and earned money as the goal. Sturgis had not known how much all this meant to him, how desperately he wanted what he had not even formulated, until now that he was confronted with the loss. He might have gone away, absconded (and in fact that was precisely the advice given him by a voice inside his head, like shouts of warning: “Run! Pack! Get aboard the midnight train! Get out!”) but he did not. He went and faced Mrs Wingate and her daughter. Man enough to meet his responsibilities, he was not man enough to run. It was the saddest day of his life, not only because it marked his entrance into an existence for which he was unsuited, but also because it was the day when he first faced the fact that he had limitations as a man.

  The wedding was at the Wingate house, in that same parlor, because the first cases of yellow fever had appeared by then and gatherings were forbidden even at church. Besides the minister and the principals there were only the mother and the two bachelor brothers-in-law, the veterans. One gave the bride away; ten days later he was dead of the fever, and the other was dead of the same cause before the end of summer; he had been best-man. Sturgis had not suggested that his father attend, and neither Mrs Sturgis nor Esther brought it up; apparently they had never heard of Barney Sturgis. At the wedding Mrs Wingate was as stiff and proud as ever, like a general at a surrender following a battle lost to guile and superior numbers, but she unbent as far as she was able so that not even her husband’s brothers might suspect that she had been maneuvered into something.

  There was no honeymoon. Trains and steamboats had suspended operations south of Cairo, and even if the bride and groom had managed to reach one of the outlying cities, Nashville or Atlanta, say, they would have been locked in a pest house as soon as it became known that they were from the fever-ridden Mississippi Valley. Sturgis moved directly into the house, into the upstairs front left bedroom which Mrs Wingate assigned them. He brought everything he owned in an imitation-leather suitcase and a cardboard packing case tied around and around with rope. Mrs Wingate spent the wedding night with friends, as was the custom, but she was back next morning for late breakfast.

  So they took up their lives, the three of them in the high-ceilinged mansion built in the days when Bristol was no more than a nameless river landing where steamboats took on cotton and firewood without staying long enough to affect the pressure in their boilers. In time, however, though it was scorned by the floating palaces, the landing became a stopping-off place for flatboatmen. They had slept and worked off the aftereffects of their Memphis excesses by then, Memphis being a hundred and fifty miles upriver, and by the time they reached Bristol they were primed for another bender—“carrying a load of steam,” they said, that would not wait for Vicksburg, another hundred miles downriver. The se
ttlement grew from a cluster of grogshops, fiercely competitive over the chance to wet the brawlers’ thirsts. Originally the Wingate house was more than a mile beyond the remotest shack of the hamlet (it was built in 1845 nearly two miles east of the landing, not quite out of earshot of the roistering flatboatmen) but gradually during the antebellum years and rapidly during the post-Reconstruction building boom, which was in full swing in 1878 when the fever epidemic brought it to a temporary halt, the town extended eastward in the direction of the Wingate plantation, foreshadowing a time when the house itself would be surrounded by bright, one-story, boxlike bungalows, as if it had spawned or littered overnight, and townspeople would point it out to visitors as a landmark, a relic. “This used to be country, out here,” they would say. “Look how Bristol has grown.”

  But that was still in the future, beyond the present. No part of the plantation had yet become part of the town, and for John Sturgis now it was as if he had entered another world indeed, a place where all values were reversed, where the qualities he introduced, those upon which his business success and his general popularity had depended, were alien and contemptible. His whinnying laugh was no longer infectious. It caused, rather, a stiffening of backbones, a pursing of lips, a raising of bland eyebrows. His voice was too loud for the echoing rooms; he had trouble understanding that a larger space called for a smaller voice. Yet as soon as he understood this, as soon as he began to speak with something less than a shout, his camaraderie paled. It had been mainly a matter of confidence anyhow, and now that the confidence was gone he felt trapped. He showed it, too.