Jordan County

by Shelby Foote

  Whatever else Ella gave up, she did not give up dancing. The Christmas holidays began, the series of dances that would continue through New Year’s, and Hector saw her as if for the first time. She had always gone with older boys; he had entertained no hopes, considering her beyond him. But now he did — and she saw him, too; he could tell. Abnegation lent sorrow to her face, a new, profounder beauty supplementing that which always had caused half the stags to cluster about her portion of the dance floor. With a suddenness and force that knocked all other thoughts from his head, Hector believed he had found the answer to every problem that had ever come his way. Love was his release from the burden coming-of-age had thrust upon him; Love was his consolation for all failures, all short-comings; he perceived now that nothing could ever be really unbearable if a man had Love to turn to. Also, she needed him. This alone, in Hector’s mind, was enough to recommend marriage. In point of fact, however, he was gone before he ever suspected a bait or looked for a reason. He was wooed, snared — thrown — by the old eternal feminine, the nun-like attitude of fallen women who have changed their ways if for no other cause but a whim.

  He proposed on the fire-escape landing at the Elysian Club; they had stepped out for a breath of air between numbers, and Ella did what she had every cause to do; she accepted. They left at once, not going back through the ballroom because she had a date in there; woke up the old j.p. who filled out the license and married them, his wife and spinster daughter standing by in wrappers and curl-papers, two gray loveless ghosts; and then drove home in the surrey, all before midnight. They were in evening clothes, Ella’s satin dance slippers peeping from under the hem of her gown. Hector kept talking, talking; his eyes glittered with excitement and his starched white shirtfront flashed cold in the moonlight, like a shield. Ella had never seen him like this before, nor had anyone else. However, as they rode out toward the Sturgis house along the quiet, moon-silvered road, the mare’s hoofs clopping with a hollow sound like drumtaps along the way to a scaffold, he became less and less hilarious and more and more preoccupied. The euphoria was playing out.

  ‘He’s scared of that old woman,’ Ella thought. ‘Of what she’ll do.’

  She was right; he was frightened — and so for that matter was she. For Mrs Sturgis was formidable, especially when challenged on her own ground, which was where they were headed now in the surrey. Hector was her chief possession, the one to which all others — house, plantation, bank account, even the highborn insularity — were adjunct. Ella imagined the scene she believed would greet them. Yet presently, as the three of them stood in the parlor, mother and son and daughter-in-law, it was not at all as she had feared. Mrs Sturgis did not rave and wring her hands or tear her hair. Rather, she was remembering a similar scene a generation back, in the time of fever, when the red-faced feed and grain salesman with the celluloid collar and the carroty hair had come into this same room and spoken for her hand with such well-founded assurance. She remembered the sound of their voices: “When?” “Soon” — “How soon?” “Soon as possible,” and the way her mother had looked at the young man with a curiously combined expression of pride and defeat. (Six months later Hector was born and they swathed his hands in oil-soaked cotton and told callers he had no fingernails.) But this time it was a woman being brought into the house, and somehow that seemed a greater desecration. She herself was in her mother’s position, faced with what the diplomats called a fait accompli, having to accept what she could not alter. There was nothing she could do about it, any more than there had been anything Mrs Wingate could do about it twenty years ago. Remembering that time, Mrs Sturgis crossed the parlor and sat in the chair her mother had sat in when the roles were reversed.

  She assigned Hector and Ella the upstairs front left bedroom where she and Sturgis had lived. Her room, formerly her mother’s, was directly across the hall. Sometimes in the night she would lie awake, hearing the muffled voices and the profound silence and then the voices again, and she would hate them in her heart for having what she had lost, for having what she perhaps had never known. She would lie awake in the cold wide bed and hate them out of envy and regret, with a taste in her mouth like brass and a tight, constricting hoop about her chest. There was satisfaction, though, in suspecting that her mother had felt the same things in her time, fifteen and twenty years ago, when she was the one who lay awake in this same bed, tasting brass and breathing pain, while her daughter in the room across the hall took her pleasure, emitted those little choking sobs, never knowing how soon it would end, how soon the wheel would come full circle and passion be replaced by emptiness.

  But Hector entered this new world without considering anything from the old one. He was young in it, quite unaware that anyone ever before had had what he was having. Sometimes at the breakfast table, after all that had happened in the night, he would look at Ella, the pale loveliness, the big green eyes, the mass of dark hair crowning the triangle of brow and chin, and his hands would become so awkward that he could not hold the fork; he would sit with his head lowered, feeling turmoil in his chest, the pounding that came whenever he looked at her and told himself that she was his, that they belonged to each other. It was like nothing he had ever suspected. When the three of them were together this way and Mrs Sturgis happened to have her attention drawn aside, giving instructions to one of the servants, Ella would look at him covertly, smiling that slow, secret smile, and he would feel the hair stir at the nape of his neck and his mouth would go dry.

  It continued like this, with nothing to distract him. He did not even wonder where she had learned all she was teaching him. The academic Why he had brought to farming was forgotten; now his only concern was How. Then one night in early February they lay in bed talking, and Ella said suddenly, almost casually, as if it has just occurred to her: “Did you know we’re kin to each other, sort of?”

  “What do you mean, kin? How kin?”

  “I dont know exactly, for sure. But we’re kin, all right.” Ella was quiet for a moment. Then she told him. “My great-grandfather, my father’s grandfather, brought your grandfather over here from Ireland after his trouble. Your father’s father, that was. My great-grandfather had a saloon here in Bristol called the Palace, and he came over to work for him. They were cousins. Second cousins, once removed I think. What does that make us?”

  Hector did not answer. He was recalling something. It floated up from the dark well of the past, and when it broke the surface he saw again the hunch-shouldered man posed against the backdrop of racked bottles, looking at him with narrowed eyes out of the cavernous gloom while he sat in the carriage outside in brilliant sunlight; he heard Emma as she leaned forward, balancing the parasol like a tightrope walker, and whispered: “Thats yo granddaddy!” He had never seen him again, for when he came back from his freshman year at Virginia the saloon had been remodeled and there was a different bartender, a young man in a drill jacket. Hector went into the saloon for the first time in his life. “Old Barney?” the new man said. “He died last winter,” and that was all.

  “What kind of trouble?” Hector asked.

  “Hm?”

  “You said your grandfather brought him—”

  “Great-grandfather.”

  “— brought him over from Ireland after his trouble. What kind of trouble was it?”

  “Oh,” Ella said. She paused. “I thought you knew. They always kind of kept it in the family. Mamma told me about it years ago; she heard it from Daddy. I thought surely your father would have told you. He was there and saw it, and anyhow he must have heard about it afterwards, even if he was too young to remember.”

  Hector lay staring up toward the invisible ceiling, his breath coming quicker and sharper while Ella told about Barney Sturgis, a farmer in one of the worst farming countries in the world. He had lived on rented land in County Down with his young wife, children coming regularly — there were three, two girls and a boy; the boy was the youngest — and one morning he came back unexpectedly from the field and f
ound his wife in the house with a man. They were in bed, the two heads on one pillow, looking at him in the doorway. At first the wife was frightened, but at length, as Barney continued to stand there looking foolish and too hurt to speak, she began to smile. Maybe it was from nerves or embarrassment or even fright; he told himself later that he could have forgiven it. But then the man smiled too, the two smiling faces on the one pillow. That was what did it, the smiles. Barney went to the woodpile and returned with the ax, running. He killed his wife right there in the bedroom, one blow with the blunt end, and killed the man, still running, when he caught up with him half a mile from the house. The way Ella heard it, the man (“He was what they call a tinker, and traveled round in a pony cart mending pots and pans and grinding scissors”) ran the last fifty yards with the bit of the ax in his skull and the helve down his back like a queue. The children looked over the low stone wall flanking the road the two men ran their race along; they saw the whole thing, round-eyed.

  So Hector came to believe that what he had seen in those eyes, fifteen years ago — they inside in the darkness, he outside in the sunlight — was a reflection of the thing that had brought Barney Sturgis thirty-five hundred miles across the ocean, then southward down a strange continent to tend bar in Mississippi. It explained why he had never had anything to do with women, not even for the sake of having one to raise his children, the two daughters married and gone by the time they were into their middle teens. Hector believed also that it perhaps explained much of what he had never understood about his father, who had been so gloomy, so melancholy, the dark-souled Anglo-Saxon hidden behind the flashy clothes and the salesman’s smile and smalltalk. He thought of his father as a child in faroff Ireland, not even old enough to go to school, leaning over the wall to watch the tinker run down the road with the bit of the ax wedged into his skull and the helve down his back like a wooden pigtail, then going into the house, maybe even into the bedroom spattered with his mother’s blood shed by his father. John Sturgis had grown up with that; it stayed with him always, no matter how young he had been at the time. Probably from year to year, whether in Sunday school as a boy or later in fireside conversation with a garrulous preacher improving the shining hour, there had been talk about the mark of Cain—

  And then it came into Hector’s mind that the same impulse must flow in his veins, the stain of blood carried down from father to son and from father to son. He tried to remember, but could not, the Bible verse about the sins of the fathers being visited. It said something about the third generation: “Yea, even unto the third and fourth generation …” He would remember to look it up, or ask Mr Clinkscales.

  “I thought you knew,” Ella said. She had raised herself on one elbow and was looking down at him. He could barely see her in the gloom, the face above the faintly luminous shoulders.

  “I didnt know.”

  She let herself down. Again they lay side by side, as removed as two corpses in a winter tomb, both looking up toward the ceiling. Then she turned her head on the pillow and spoke with her lips close to his ear. “Well, goodness,” she said, “dont take it so serious. He had every right. Besides, it was a long time ago, way off in Ireland.”

  This shadow moved over the first year of their marriage, was cleared momentarily by the birth of a son — called Hector too: Hector the fourth, in January of 1901 — but then moved back, even darker than before.

  Two: then three: then four in the house, around the dining room table — mother and son and daughter-in-law and grandson, entering the new century: thus it progressed through a time without subtraction. Bristol continued its growth eastward from the river, first to and then beyond the house (called the Sturgis house now, except by a few older Bristolians who still called it the Wingate place, out of habit and a determination never to give way); Mrs Sturgis had subdivided another Hundred, and this was Hector’s vocation, or anyhow his occupation; he drew the plans.

  Mechanical drawing had been his favorite subject at school, and now he spent all his time at it; farming had gone by the board. He even kept regular hours — ‘office hours’ he called them, and so they were. His downstairs study was equipped as a draftsman’s office, including a desk with an adjustable lid, lamps to throw the light just right, India inks in all the colors of the rainbow, and T-squares hung like gripless broadswords on the wall. Here was where he drew and redrew plans for the subdivision, tree-bordered avenues named for historically prominent Mississippians from the state at large and cross-streets named for early Bristol settlers. It was more for amusement than in earnest, however; he enjoyed it too much to be able to think of it as work, and Mrs Sturgis used the plans or not, as she saw fit.

  That was at first. A time was coming when she would prize them, would use them as a blueprint for East Bristol, overriding her advisory engineers whenever they suggested a change — even in such small matters as the location of a fire hydrant (“I want it precisely the way it is on the map.” “But, Mrs Sturgis, the pipe line …” “I want it this way.” “Yes maam”) — and would offer them as the Wingate bid for a place in the world of art. But that was later; that was ten years after he put ten years of work on them.

  It began at the suggestion of his mother, while Ella was far along in pregnancy. They had Mr Clinkscales out for supper one night; he had recently lost his wife and the parishioners were taking turns at trying to console him. They were in the parlor, having coffee, when Mrs Sturgis began to speak of her plans for extending the subdivision.

  “You took that kind of work at school,” she said to Hector. “Maybe you could block it out for me. It doesnt have to be anything special, just sketches I could use to show the men who do such things approximately what I want. They gave me the address of a man they said could do it, but I dont know. Do you think you could?”

  “I think I could.”

  “You could?”

  “I think I could.”

  “A truly noble conception!” Mr Clinkscales suddenly cried. He sat forward on the edge of his chair as he said it, and for the rest of the evening he spoke with enthusiasm of the notion of a mother and son working together to build a new Bristol. It appealed to him morally and esthetically, so to speak. “Who knows?” he said. “Who can tell? Together, with God’s blessing — which surely He will not withhold — you may perhaps be laying the groundwork, the foundation for a future Athens, an Athens of the South. Yes. And this young woman’s child, so soon to be born,” he added, indicating Ella with a deferential nod, “will be one of its leading citizens, the one perhaps under whom it will come to flower, a beacon for the South, a torch held out.”

  His voice had regained its old resonance. Mrs Sturgis beamed with pleasure, for up until this outburst of enthusiasm no one had been able to bring him out of the despondency into which he had sunk when he buried his wife three weeks before. Then, the notion having served its purpose, she would have forgotten it. But next morning Hector went downtown immediately after breakfast and returned with a roll of drafting paper, a packet of thumbtacks, and a box of hard-lead pencils. He rummaged in his trunk until he found his drawing instruments, then took them out of their plush-lined case and polished them. While the cook looked on resentfully, he commandeered the big biscuit board from the kitchen, tacked a sheet of the drafting paper to it, and set to work.

  That was the very beginning. The old fascination the work had had for him in school returned, the precise, mathematical beauty, the neat geometrical simplicity in which a single line, drawn clear and sharp, was as mind-filling as the most complicated theory any philosopher ever contemplated and evolved. Hector wondered why he had forgotten how much pleasure it gave him, both to do the work and to look at it after it was done. He began with a small-scale drawing, but new ideas came crowding fast. By the time he was half way through it he had conceived the project which, in one sense, was to be his life’s work. Gridding the sheets into sections, he reproduced these sections a sheet at a time, on a scale of one to one hundred — “A shade more than an
eighth of an inch to a foot,” he explained, showing them to his mother.

  He was enthusiastic from the start, and though Mrs Sturgis was a bit perturbed at seeing him race off with her suggestion in this manner (his hands trembled with excitement, holding the sheets for her to examine) she was glad to see him interested in something besides Ella and she encouraged him to continue with the work. It solved another question, too — the question of what he was going to do — for after all, this was not Europe; even the highborn Wingate tradition could not support an idler. Ever since he had failed at farming, Mrs Sturgis had had the problem of finding an occupation for her son. It could not be a menial job, such as weigher in the gin, yet apparently he could not fill a responsible position. Now there was this, and she welcomed it because it automatically made him something more than an idler and a husband. She paid for whatever special equipment he ordered. “Go right ahead. Whatever you need,” she told him. Soon his study was crowded with the paraphernalia of draftsmen.

  The total absorption came later, in the troubled years. It was in those years that he began to add colors, green for trees and lawns, blue for the water in drainage ditches and artificial ponds, red for underground installations, mains and sewers. By then black was reserved for details such as carriage blocks and arc lights, streetcars and delivery wagons, and finally the people themselves, as seen from above, going about their work and their pleasures. In the end it became compulsive, obsessive. He would see a thing while out for a stroll, for instance a group of boys running after the ice wagon, and would hurry home to get out his instruments and put it on the map, crowding them in one after another, colors and details overlapping, until at last the sheets resembled a futuristic painting, a bird’s-eye view of Utopia, one to one hundred.