Jordan County

by Shelby Foote

  Going into the house was like re-entering the coolness of night. As Hector passed through the lower hall he looked to the right, into the parlor, and saw his mother sitting in her armchair, a shawl about her shoulders and her hair a pale gleam in the dawn-shadowed room. ‘She knows all about it,’ he thought. ‘She sat right there, speaking to no one and no one speaking to her, yet she knows all about it.’

  Then, taking the first step on the stairs, he heard her say his name. He did not stop or even hesitate, any more than he had done three hours ago when she spoke from her room as he came downstairs to investigate the constable’s rapping at the door. He could not afford to stop; he was hoarding that diminishing span of time before he would burst into tears. Climbing the stairs was like ascending a slope at a high altitude, each step demanding an exertion out of all proportion to the gain involved, where a degree or two of fever would approach the boiling-point of blood. What was more, something seemed to be dragging his arm out of its socket. Then he remembered the ax. He dropped it on the landing. That was better, though not much better. Crossing the upper hall he staggered like a man who has swum from a shipwreck a long way through surf before reaching the beach. He went directly to his room, sat on the bed, and began to unlace his shoes. But he was too tired even for this. He had one shoe off and the other half-unlaced when the weariness came down; he sank back, staring wide-eyed at the ceiling. ‘Now I’ll cry,’ he thought, surrendering at last to what he had fought against for the past three hours. But the tears did not come. He could feel the tear ducts trying to function, pump, but no tears came.

  He lay there, flat on his back and trembling, and suddenly for no reason he remembered Sunday mornings at church when he was a boy. He always went with his grandmother. She wore a dress that rustled and Samuel wore a broadcloth coat with fire-gilt buttons. All the way to church they heard the bell toll; they got there just as it stopped, and the others were all in their places, turning to watch as Hector and Mrs Wingate came down the aisle. Mr Clinkscales apparently took this as a signal, for then the service would begin, though maybe it was coincidental; they were never really late enough for Hector to know for sure. The pew had a smell of varnish which he thought of as the special odor of sanctity. The dime he held was sweaty by the time the plate came round. To his left a stained-glass window showed an angel standing barefoot in a field of bright green grass that grew brighter and greener as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that wall of the church. The angel had one hand on the head of a fuzzy, blue-eyed lamb. The scarlet of the angel’s lips had been misplaced in processing and lay outside the border of the mouth like a lipsticked kiss of shame. Hector recalled, too, that the lamb had carried a cross, one of its cloven forehoofs hooked around the upright.

  Remembering, almost dreaming, he lay on the bed. Then, without having heard any sound precede it, he felt something cool and soft upon his forehead. His lids lifted and the shape hovering above him might have been a ghost, Ella come back; he caught his breath. But when he focussed his eyes he saw that the shape was his mother. “There, there,” she said, stroking his brow as she said it. “There, there.” This soothed him. He relaxed and the tears came at last; the tears welled up. “There, there. There, there,” his mother said as he wept.

  She had waited for this through all these years, and now she had it.

  3

  That was a Thursday. The funeral was Friday. Normally this would have been considered indecent haste, but people not only ‘understood,’ they even stayed away — out of delicacy, they said; that was the word they used. Many, however, did not forego the chance to ride past during the graveside service, some in buggies, some in automobiles, to see if their fellow townsmen (they said) had shown a like consideration. Just as that morning they had collected at the depot, craning over each other’s shoulders to watch the drummer’s coffin and sample cases being put aboard the northbound train, so now they formed a parade going past the cemetery, riding slow in order that only a thin screen of dust would obscure their view of the little knot of mourners about the grave, and lacking only hampers and blazers and mandolins to make it resemble the holiday outing it really was.

  For thirty-six hours Bristol had hummed with the news. People heard it with incredulity and passed it along with an air of having foretold it. Women discussed it in grocery stores and over backyard fences, tipping their heads together and hiding their mouths with their hands as they spoke, as if in fear of lip-readers, their eyes at once shocked and eager, their cheeks flushed as if they were into the final stage of what was called galloping consumption. “Have you heard about Ella Sturgis? Did you ever?” Men gathered on street corners and reviewed her life over bars and café counters, philosophizing on mortality and the sanctity of marriage, much as the night clerk had done in conversation with the constable, in defense and condemnation, alternately saturnine and sardonic. This death seemed such a waste. “They say you cant take it with you. Ha. By golly, she took it with her.”

  It had been a crazy year, a keyed-up summer. There was a fat man in the presidency who was everything a fat man ought to be, jovial and expansive, yet the government was split on issues that were hard to understand. Society women up East were said to be smoking cigarettes, and at a private dinner in Washington when the Russian ambassador’s wife asked for a light, the president himself had held the match. A man flew in an aeroplane from New York to Philadelphia and back, making a mile a minute some of the time. The comet hung in the sky like a warning sign from God, but in early summer when the earth was scheduled to pass through its flaming wake there had been neither a bombardment of meteors nor clouds of poisonous gases to choke them in their beds; there wasnt even any stardust in the streets, and after the first elation at having been spared the fire from heaven, there was also a feeling that God had forgotten them, a feeling that God had no care for either their enormities or their prayers. Then in the month just past, on the Fourth — which, except by scattered groups of unregenerate and pastless Irishmen whooping and blowing anvils, went uncelebrated still in Mississippi because that was the day when Vicksburg fell nearly fifty years ago — a white man and a Negro stevedore stood toe to toe on a roped-off square of canvas in Reno, Nevada, slamming away at each other for the championship of the world, fifteen rounds under a broiling sun, and the Negro won. Bonfires that night in Lick Skillet and Ram Cat lighted the northeast sky; there was dancing in the streets in front of the cabins, and a hum of voices: “Jack Jawson whupped that white man to his knees!” But next morning when they came to work in the kitchens and gardens there was nothing in their faces to show their feelings, nothing at all, except that the whites of their eyes were threaded with red in proof of the whiskey drunk.

  Bristol now was a far cry from Bristol as it had been, back in that other century when Hector was a boy and a young man. Progress had caught up with it; the automobile had run it down, and the saxophone moaned over the remains. Those four dominants rising out of the past — the trees, the war, the Negroes, the river — no longer cast their shadows across the present and were not included in any calculations for the future. Many of the trees had been felled to make way for widening the boulevards, and others were dying of thirst, choked by the concrete poured close about their trunks for the new sidewalks; the leafy tunnels were badly gapped, as if by shellfire, and dead leaves fell unseasonally. The veterans who turned out for parades and barbecues were only a handful now; blear-eyed, they went on canes, and none of them sucked in their stomachs now or skipped to keep step with the music; the battle names had been forgotten along with the cause for which they were fought, the fields themselves planted in cotton or run to weeds. The Negroes had worn out the gay-colored shirtwaists and swallowtail coats and did not replace them, for they were too poor; their faces no longer resembled masks, for they knew no secret; Haiti and John Brown had no connection with such as these. The river was not grand and glittery any more; the showboats were tinsel affairs, and the old luxury packets, the Natchez, the Robert E. Lee, the Big
Jim White, were bleaching their ribs on mudflats all the way from Cairo to New Orleans, the pulsing throb and rumble of their whistles drowned by the piercing, one-note shriek of locomotives.

  New dominants replaced them. The Opera House, which had boasted occasional traveling companies playing Ben Hur and the like, was the Bijou now, the first cinema palace in the delta; beneath the lancing beam of the projector the audience crouched in the gloom, serried like countrymen in the old dank multiholed privies, their upturned faces drinking the frictionless shadows of a nation’s desire, changing the shape of Woman to Mary Pickford and looking forward to Clara Bow and Garbo. An automobile, snarling and malodorous, was no longer a curiosity on the sparrow-infested streets. The telephone, already common in houses not yet wired for electricity, had given every man an extra voice, squeaky and inflectionless like Punch infuriated, punctuated by wire-hum instead of smiles and nods, as he spoke into an oblong box screwed to the wall, filled with wire and buzzers and fronted by a tulip-like funnel on a stalk that cupped and threw his breath back in his face.

  Such a list could grow and grow, but these were the dominants. These were the things which the preachers, high in their pulpits, railed and cajoled against, quoting the eschatology of Jeremiah and Isaiah and Jesus — to no effect: for the people sat in their Sunday clothes, soberly nodding agreement with all the preachers said about impending doom on earth and searing flame hereafter, and came out Monday morning as before; they gave the Lord His day, and kept the other six for their own uses. Yet they were new to these involvements. These devices that saved labor agitated their brains, and there was an increasing dichotomy between the Business life and the Christian life; they began to have nervous stomachs. There were nights when they tossed sleepless in their beds, counting the small hours by the courthouse clock, and suddenly, out of nowhere, dread was like a presence in the room; hell yawned and the trumpet was about to sound; cold sweat broke out on the palms of their hands and feet, and they knew fear.

  The summer of 1910 was filled with such nights, the comet flaring like a rocket and a Negro beating a white man for a purse containing more money than most of them would ever see. All this and more went into making them ready and even anxious for some sort of personal, or at least local, outrage or affront; they were primed. So when they heard of Ella’s death, how she had been found asphyxiated in the hotel bed with the drummer in candy-striped drawers, their minds leaped at, fastened onto, and examined it inside-out. Women philosophized less than their husbands, being mainly concerned with the facts in the case, but men who had experienced her early or late promiscuity found in her death an occasion for parading what they knew for the entertainment and envy of their friends, using her light moments as a basis for conjecture into profounder mysteries. Some who had never known her at all, or had known her only to nod to, adopted an air of reticence, implying that there was much they could tell if they had not scrupled to betray a confidence or show disrespect for the dead. Others downright lied, unable to resist this easy irrefutable chance to strut and posture. Those who had known the drummer, had bought his goods or shared a bottle with him, told what a ready eye he’d had for the girls. “A rounder,” they said, laughing, and added: “I hope when my time comes I go like that.”

  Generally speaking, however, he was merely adjunctive, supplementary. It was Ella — and, by inference, the Sturgis family with her — who held the limelight. Hector was responsible, with Mrs Sturgis behind him. “If thats blue-blood,” the night clerk had said, “I’m glad I didnt have any to pass on to my kids. If a man wants his wife to stay home, he by God ought to nail her down. You see what I mean?” They saw; they followed all the clues and suggestions. For thirty-six hours the talk had been of little else — where she had been, whom she had been seen with, her partiality for traveling men — and when the thirty-six hours were up, they formed a parade out past the cemetery, just short of the lip of the grave.

  What they saw, through the trailing screen of dust like smoke, was hardly worth the trip. Only five persons attended: Mrs Sturgis and Hector, Mr Clinkscales and Harry Barnes, and Mrs Lowry. The first four of these were ranged along one side of the grave, the minister at the head with the prayer book held so close to his face that his nose was almost between the pages; his eyes were failing though he was not yet ready to admit it. Mother and son were in the center, standing close. The undertaker was at the foot, not quite on line with the others since, as he said, he never presumed to push forward socially on a basis of professional advantage. Mrs Lowry remained in the carriage because of her swollen legs. Her shoulders hunched, she wept into her handkerchief, producing a smothered, rhythmic moaning like a woman being tickled or drowned or maybe sawed in two. Anyone hearing her without knowing the occasion which brought forth these sounds would have thought she was being shaken by uncontrollable laughter: Ah, ah, ah, ha! The ha! that ended each series of ah’s was a sob of final exertion, like the ultimate gasp of a lifter of weights.

  Mr Clinkscales read from the book: “Jesus saith to his disciples, Ye now therefore have sorrow: but I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you.”

  Standing beside the grave Hector heard it all, the text along with the sobs from the nearby carriage — ah, ah, ah, ha! — but the former had no more meaning for him than the latter. The only safe and sensible thing in the world was his mother’s hand, which held firmly onto his wrist and gave it a squeeze or a comforting pat from time to time.

  “In sure and certain hope,” Mr Clinkscales read, droning fervently.

  The coffin sank on its patented rollers, going down into the earth while Mr Clinkscales prayed with his head tipped back, looking up into the sky. He was reciting poetry now, the rhymes coming through at regular intervals out of the surrounding words; death had no sting, the poem said, quoting Paul. After a silence broken only by the moans and sobs like Olympian laughter, Hector felt a tug at his sleeve. He had been feeling it for some time now, he realized, and when he looked up, Mrs Sturgis spoke to him again: “Come along, son.”

  He got into the carriage, opposite the rector and beside his mother, who sat facing the weeping seamstress.

  “The Lord giveth,” Mrs Lowry said between sobs. “The Lord taketh away.”

  As the carriage passed beneath the gateway arch (HOME OF PEACE it spelled in wrought-iron letters) Hector turned, looking back, and saw two Negroes in overalls come from behind the hearse where they had been hidden during the service. Under the direction of Mr Barnes they removed the bright green mats of artificial grass from the raw mound and began to throw pale yellow dirt into the grave. Their shovels, polished silvery by digging, flashed in the sunlight, but distance and the sound of the tires on gravel drowned the hollow clatter of clods on the lid of the coffin; Hector heard them only in his mind.

  “The Lord giveth,” Mrs Lowry said.

  She wept more quietly now, as if the final fact of death, not as one stunning blow but as a presence that would be with her all the balance of her life, had reached her at last with its strange comfort. Presently she dried her eyes, using one corner of a silk dance handkerchief a little less than half the size of a bedspread, and sat watching the houses flow past. For a time she said nothing. She sat watching. Then suddenly: “My, my,” she said, her voice sounding quite loud after the silence, “so many new ones. Bristol certainly has grown!”

  It was the first time she had left her room since the flood of 1903. Her legs bulged beneath her skirts and petticoats. Her eyes, pale green under lids inflamed from weeping, blinked weakly in the unaccustomed sunlight, and her flesh had the bluish tinge of soured milk. “Who lives there?” she asked from time to time, pointing with the hand that held the handkerchief so that it fluttered like a banner on a rampart. She had begun to sweat and the secret, unwashed parts of her body gave off a rancid odor, faintly ammoniac. The bruise-colored circles under her eyes came almost to her cheekbones.

  They had fallen into the passing column, the parade of
Bristolians who had foregone the actual funeral, the graveside service, but who could not forego having at least what they called a look-see. It wound from somewhere south of the cemetery, northward into the heart of town, inescapable and avid. The people in the surrey just ahead turned their upper bodies with sudden birdlike movements, darting glances, and from time to time one of the vehicles toward the rear would pull out of line to catch a glimpse of the Sturgis carriage. An automobile, whose driver was more adventurous than the rest, clattered past with a sound like pieces of scrap iron being shaken in a wooden tub, and though its occupants sat with their bodies held severely to the front, like cannoneers on dress parade, they twisted their heads slightly to the right as they came past, examining the quartet of mourners out of the corners of their eyes.

  Mrs Lowry wore a black taffeta tea gown, stylishly cut, which a client had never called for. She told them about that, Mr Clinkscales and Mrs Sturgis and Hector, as well as the coachman high on the box. The latter did not look back; he sat as stiff as a department store dummy, and the others were frozen in various attitudes, surprised by her sudden volubility. They avoided her eyes, which flicked from one to another while she spoke.

  “It was for Mrs Crenshaw, a dear lady; I think I might even say friend. She was looking forward to wearing it for her daughter’s coming out. God rest her soul, she passed away the night I got it finished. You remember: it was awful sudden. She’d been in the best of health right up to the day. At least we thought so. Apoplexy took her and we never even knew she had it; she never looked the least bit apoplectic, to my mind. Well, I sent word to Mr Crenshaw it was ready, in case he wanted it for her for the occasion. She’d have liked that, being buried in it I mean, after all the pains she took getting the pattern and having it fitted and all. But he never answered, then or later. You know how it is at times like that: I suppose he had enough on his mind, poor man. Dont you?”