Jordan County

by Shelby Foote

  — No it’s not; you know it’s not. It’s for your own sake. Youve been self-centered all your life, Hector Sturgis. And besides, youre worried about something there’s no need for.

  “But arent you going to fade?”

  — I’ll fade. I’m fading now.

  “Then what will I do? What will I do when youre gone?”

  — Dont fret, Hector. We’ll be together.

  “Not if you keep fading, we wont. Even if you were here I wouldnt know it; I couldnt be sure. How would I know you were with me? How would I know?”

  — Shh.

  Then he thought he understood what she meant. “Do you mean I’m going to die? I’m going with you?”

  — Shh. We wont talk about it now.

  “But I want to talk about it; I want to know!”

  He called after her, cried her name. “Ella! Ella!” he shouted. But it was no use. She was gone. He was alone.

  This time he was afraid that he had taken things too far; he was afraid that she was gone for good. For five days he sat in the room, alone and miserable, bereft. When she returned at the end of that time, she warned him not to try to find out things that were not allowed, and she made him understand that this was a final warning. She made it clear, for once and for all. There was something in her voice, cracked and broken as it was, that told him she was dreadfully in earnest. It was no longer a game. Whatever future risks he took, he would take against heavy odds, the possibility of losing all his life seemed meant for now.

  Outside, the world was sheathed in ice and people stirred as seldom as possible. They wrapped their heads in shawls and turned their collars high about their ears, lumbering along the streets like bears. They did not pause to speak to one another, satisfying themselves with quick, furtive waves of recognition. Rabbits and squirrels and birds, the woodland creatures, were locked in rigid misery; the earth itself was stiff and cramped with cold. But here inside the room, behind the bolted door, Hector had a different world — a universe within a universe, like Chinese boxes, and the fireplace was its glowing heart. If the temperature did not suit him, all he had to do was tilt the scuttle at the grate. No misery, human or otherwise, could reach him except at his bidding. It was as if he had seceded from the race. If doubts came (was she real? or was it all a delusion born of grief and regret and an inability to admit that she was gone for good, with so much left unspoken and undone?) she herself came to reassure him. For the most part, her kindness and consideration were far beyond any he had ever thought her capable of showing. No doubt was ever valid once she had allayed it; she was real as real. As for the decomposition — the one problem for which she offered no solution, no consolation — he told himself he would worry about that when the time came. There was plenty of time, here at the glowing heart of his particular universe, his nestled box.

  He would have been content to stay here, never stirring, but finally she told him it was wrong to keep himself cooped up the way he did. It was not only wrong, it was unnatural. People all over town were talking about him.

  “Talking?”

  — Yes.

  “What do they say?”

  — They say.…

  “Yes?”

  — They say youre crazy, Hector.

  So he yielded to her in this as well. Heavy snow had come behind the sleet storm, and he began to go for long walks in the woods, carrying bread in his pockets to be strewn for the birds; the snow had blanketed their food. Thus it was that farmers, riding along the slushy roads on their way from town, saw him standing alone in a wilderness of snow and fallen branches, making a sluing motion with one arm, broadcasting crumbs for a semicircle of hungry robins and blue jays and sparrows. When the farmers got home they told their wives about it. “He feeds the birds,” they said, as if this were the final, irrefutable proof of his insanity.

  They told it in town as well, the next time they came in.

  “He leaves the house now,” they said, sitting in the perfumed warmth of the barber shop, the air redolent of lather and bay rum, the razors making an intermittent, luxurious rasp against napes and jowls. “Guess why.”

  “Why?”

  “To feed the birds.”

  After a silence someone said from down the line, “Maybe he thinks he’s Saint Francis. Somebody told me he was growing a funny-looking beard.”

  “Or Napoleon,” another added, the voice muffled under a hot towel. “Was he wearing a three-corner hat? Did he have one hand in the front of his coat and a spit curl on his forehead?”

  They would laugh at this for a while — rather moderately by now, however, for it was beginning to wear a bit thin already — and pass on to another, newer topic.

  The women were the ones who kept it going. They continued, ohing and ahing over scraps of information, much as a dog will worry a chip or a rag.

  “Feeds the birds?”

  “Yes. Henry saw him the other day.”

  “Actually saw him?”

  “Yes. Off in the woods, feeding them.”

  “Oh. Oh, thats bad.”

  “But thats not all. Henry says —” And so forth.

  Hector knew nothing of all this, beyond the recent information that they were saying he was crazy. He was happy and oblivious, having Ella with him. Always now, when he came back from walks in the woods, he found her waiting for him. She never failed him now; he had never known such a period of happiness. But her voice became weaker and weaker. He had to strain to hear her now. It was only by the closest attention that he was able to distinguish what she was saying, and even then he lost most of the words. He did not ask her to repeat them, however: partly because the topics of conversation were so trivial that the loss did not matter, and partly because he knew that it embarrassed her to have him call attention to these evidences of her deterioration.

  All the same there was no doubt that she was slipping from him. Soon he would be left alone, with all the anguish loneliness would bring, and he would not have seen her even once during all these visits. He tried again to persuade her to make herself visible to him; she had never denied that she could do so at will. But she refused. At first she was almost coy about it, assuming a tone of modesty and shame quite out of keeping with her character in life. Later, though, she threatened to leave for good and all if he kept harping on the subject. This frightened him into being satisfied with what he had, out of fear of otherwise having nothing.

  Through all these months, while winter lost its grip and spring came on, he never saw her but once, and even that once was only in a dream.

  In this dream he wakes suddenly out of a sound sleep. Lying flat on his back he looks down the length of his body, beyond the foot of the bed and across half the width of the room, to where Ella is sitting in the chair he used to sit in while he waited with the ax. It is between dawn and sunrise; a faint glow of daylight, pearly and sourceless, comes through the windows at his left.

  ‘It’s Ella,’ he thinks. ‘She has come back. She has finally come. After all these months of waiting and hoping, hoping and waiting, she is here.’

  He sees her vaguely, in outline as it were, and it stirs a memory of something he once saw in a Washington theater when he was at school: the figure of a woman seated behind a diaphanous curtain on a dimly lighted stage. She is slouched in the chair, her legs crossed at the shins, one hand relaxed in her lap, the other supporting her head from the rear, the elbow resting against the low back of the chair. She seems infinitely patient, infinitely calm. This too is memory: he identifies it as the classic pose which he has seen in the attitudes of the women on Grecian urns. She is looking at him, her head tilted slightly back, eyes limpid in dark sockets, a limpidity amounting almost to liquefaction, as if they held their shape merely by surface tension; a shake of her head might break the tension and cause them to trickle down her cheeks, like tears.

  But no matter how he strains he cannot make out the features of her face. He can see them in outline; they are there, all right—mouth, nose, chin, b
row—but they are ill-defined, as in a photograph blurred by motion or poor focus. At first he thinks this is because of some fault of vision, because his eyes are still heavy with sleep and will not function properly; but when he looks more closely, raising himself in bed, supporting his weight with both hands behind him on the mattress, and straining his eyes in the poor light, he sees that this is because the face, each individual feature of the face, has decomposed, has crumbled into ruin.

  — You shouldnt have waited so long, he says.

  — What?

  Apparently it has affected her hearing too, even those small bones of the inner ear which murder-story writers tell us are the last to go, even in the searing heat of a furnace, and therefore serve to establish a corpus delicti.

  — You should have come sooner, Ella.

  — I havent come at all, she says. Youre only dreaming, Hector. Look behind you.

  He looks over his shoulder and sees himself lying full-length on the bed, asleep, corpse-quiet, arms rigid at his sides, the incipient beard dark against the waxen face, the nose like a beak arching upward. Then he looks back at Ella, halfway across the room. The light is weak but lucent, without shadows, and now that he has learned the cause of what he thought was faulty vision on his part, he can see her face quite clearly. The chin moves with a curious up-and-down motion, like that of a ventriloquist’s dummy, between slits extending vertically from the corners of her mouth, downward past both sides of the point of her chin, and as she speaks she makes a scratching movement with the hand at the back of her head.

  She goes on speaking, telling him it is only a dream, a dream within a dream. But he is not listening; he is getting out of bed, moving cautiously for fear that she will see him. There must be something wrong with her sight as well, for she does not see that he is approaching; she goes on speaking, her face toward the figure asleep on the bed. The ruin is more apparent at close range. One cheek has crumbled nearly away, and the flesh of her throat is mottled with yellow and purple, a marbled effect. He is alongside the chair by now, passing to its rear, when he sees something that stops him.

  The hand he thought was scratching the back of her head is actually working a lever which extends from a hole in her skull; she moves it up and down with her fingers as she speaks. Evidently a system of wires and pulleys connects the lever with her chin, for he can hear them creaking as they move. He is horrified past caution.

  — Ella! he cries.

  She sees now for the first time that he has left the bed, has discovered the extent of her disintegration, the secret lever. She is embarrassed, flustered, and she turns her head to hide the mechanism. However, she soon recovers her composure.

  — You neednt be so ill-mannered, she says primly. We’re all this way, this side of death. Youll see.

  And she begins to fade. He calls after her, Ella! Ella! but she has faded; “Ella! Ella!” he called. But he was alone in the room, sitting bolt-upright in the bed with both arms stretched toward the empty chair, and dawn had not even broken.

  February went out raw and windy, with blackbirds in startled flight like dashes of pepper blown across a page, but March brought a week of warm rain that melted the snow in the secret shady places, sluiced the dirty ice from fields and gutters, and pattered monotonously against the window panes. This in turn gave way to a spell of sunny weather. Birds hopped and sang in the tasseling oaks; cottonwoods popped their buttons, and the sky was high and dazzling. The cold returned for a three-day Easter snap; then the pecan trees put out their pale green leaflets and spring came in to stay. Barefoot children all over Bristol leaped and shouted in the puddles, and people once more took the time and trouble to speak to one another on the street.

  But no matter how much wind might veer and bluster, or rain come down, or April sunlight pave the streets with gold, there was little change inside the Sturgis house. Hector’s mother continued to avoid provoking him. He seemed almost happy nowadays, for all his absent manner, and she accepted this as a sign that he was making progress toward the day when he would be cured — ‘himself again’ she called it. She watched and waited and let him strictly alone. As the year wore on, however, moving now toward summer, the long hot days with the sun like hammered brass, she began to note an increasing discontent. He was as preoccupied as ever, communicating with no one; but he was restless, fretful.

  He had developed a facial tic that twitched one corner of his mouth, agitating the beard which had been growing since the time of the big snow. The hairs grew thick and soft about his lips and on his chin, the color of burnt-over grass or sun-bleached hay, but they thinned out along the lower planes of his cheeks and did not grow at all on his upper jaws, where an adolescent fuzz tapered down from the sideburns. Negroes called it a Chinaman’s beard, and it did in fact give him rather a Mongolian aspect. Much else had changed as well. In the old days he had been meticulous about his clothes, making a complaint if the washwoman ironed wrinkles in his collars or his shirtfronts, insisting that his suits be sponged and pressed each time he took them off, and wearing the latest styles ahead of their general adoption. For all this the town had called him a dude and made conjectures about his prowess as a lover. But now when he went for his afternoon walk he wore rumpled trousers without a belt and a shirt without a tie. There were days when he neglected to comb his hair, and sometimes in setting out he even forgot to change from carpet slippers.

  Mrs Sturgis of course observed all this and she worried more as time went by, though it did not show in her face. She had not aged perceptibly in the seventeen years since her ordeal with the fever that had killed her husband and her mother. (Nor did her appearance change appreciably in all the years that followed. It was as if she had been baked by some ceramic process in the fever oven; all that Time could do to her had been done in that one month, with her fellow townsmen dying all around her and the bell of the dead wagon sounding through the streets. Perhaps the secret of her longevity was that no germ could live where all those stronger ones had raged and been defeated. For when, eventually, the machine wore out by pure and simple friction and they put her into the ground at last, she looked almost exactly as she had looked on the afternoon when Hector arrived from the depot, found her asleep in bed and mistook her for her mother.) But now, no matter how little it showed, she was worried about her son. She thought perhaps she should call in a doctor or try again to persuade Hector to go somewhere with her for a consultation, inventing any pretext. Then she remembered the look on his face when she suggested Cooper’s Wells, half blankness and half hatred, and more than anything else she feared, she feared that he would hate her.

  Daily on his walks, skirting the woods two miles beyond the house, Hector went past a cabin where Samuel and Emma, the coachman and his wife, had lived since Mrs Sturgis pensioned them off, five years ago. She gave them the cabin to live in and an adjoining half-acre garden plot where Samuel raised vegetables which he sold in Bristol, either to the markets or from door to door whenever the markets would not take them, for enough small change to keep a bait of sidemeat and molasses in the larder, coffee in the coffee pot, and coal-oil in the lamp. They were both incredibly old, older Hector thought than any two people he had ever known, and they lived apart from the world. Other Negroes, on the way from town in their Sunday clothes, would take off their good shoes and go half a mile across muddy fields to keep from having to pass the cabin after dark. Emma was supposed to have powers of evil at her command.

  She had always been peculiar, from back in her nursemaid days, but a little over five years ago she went out of her mind completely. It happened at a religious gathering, a sanctifying held on the banks of Moccasin Creek. Though Emma had never been especially religious, at least so far as anyone had known, the Spirit moved her this day, and she came through with such fervor that she never recovered from it — another instance, perhaps, of the medieval legend depicted in woodcuts, showing the devil in church whispering into the ear of a maiden who knelt in prayer, though of course it
might have been much simpler; maybe she just went ‘off.’ At any rate, Mrs Sturgis had had to let her go soon afterwards, and Samuel as well. Nowadays Emma sat by the fire (there was always a fire on the cabin hearth, big and roaring in the winter, smaller in the summer, a glow of embers) watching it through a pair of old-fashioned, octagonal spectacle frames that had belonged to Mrs Wingate. Hector remembered the day his grandmother dropped them out of the carriage; Samuel got down and picked them up, and Mrs Wingate let him keep them for ‘pride specs.’ Emma claimed them soon afterwards; she had kept them ever since. One of the eyepieces was empty. The other held a jagged star; it glittered in the flicker and dance of flames on the hearth.

  Samuel was suspect too, since he lived with Emma and suffered no resultant hurt. When he went into town with the sack of vegetables across his shoulder, small children ran from the sight of him in fear that he would carry them off in his sack, as their nurses had told them he would do if they misbehaved, and older ones ran after him to prove their heroism, chanting “Sam, Sam, the conjure man! I aint scared of the conjure man!” but keeping safely out of reach of the stick he brandished. The bravest of them threw clods at him. Age had bent him; he had the wrinkled, grimacing face of a gnome.

  Day after day Hector went past the cabin, a sway-backed, paintless two-room structure of home-ripped plank, built in his grandfather’s time, before the war. The yard was grassless and the gallery sagged upon the rotting steps. When the weather was fine he would see a little man standing in the vegetable plot, leaning on a spade to watch him pass. He did not recognize Samuel until one day the former coachman left his spade stuck upright in the earth and came running out to the road to meet him, crying “Marster! Little mars!” Hector stopped and he approached, bobbing and grinning. “Lord a mercy,” he said, wheezing from the run, “I like not to knowed you with all that hair on your face. Aint you got a kindly word for old Samuel helped to raise you out of knee pants? Seem to me lak you ought to have, all them times we spent together.”