Jordan County

by Shelby Foote

  From now on Samuel greeted him in this way every afternoon. He seemed glad to have found someone to speak to. “I mind the time you whopped them town boys with the book sack. He-he! You really whopped um.” Another day he said, “You look something lak your grandpappy with the musstache cross your face.” (Samuel had skipped a generation; he meant the original Hector, the one who lost his life in Mexico. The second Hector had been beardless.) “Yassah, and he was a proud, tall man in his day — a proud tall man I’m here to tell you. They dont grow um lak that no more. I members the morning he rode off to war, the one before the big one, and never come back, till all they was was a marker in the graveyard. I was stable boy then. But I dont know. It appear to me lak everything is shrunk, and me along with um. Even the watermillions is little bitty.”

  Hector scarcely replied, except with nods and headshakes; but he stood and listened willingly enough, which was certainly far more than he had done with anyone else for a long time. There was a certain kinship established. Both of them had rejected the world, or had been rejected by it, and this was their one connection.

  In June, after a month of such encounters, Samuel asked him: “Little mars, dont you want to come in the house and see old Emma used to nurse you when you was a child?” He spoke hesitantly but with a quality of urgency in his voice. “She aint just right in her mind nowdays, and it mought do her good. People talking about she’s crazy. Emma aint crazy; Emma’s lonesome, that what she is.” He led the way toward the cabin, across one corner of the vegetable patch, and Hector followed.

  Half an hour later, at home again after a two-mile run through the midsummer heat, when he looked back on what had happened in the cabin, all he could remember was the sudden scream that rose in terror and the swirl of motion on the hearth where the woman crouched and hid her eyes and called on God to save her from the devil.

  They had crossed the sagging gallery, Samuel muttering at Hector’s elbow, and when he first entered the cabin, out of the blaze of sunlight, it was as if he had stepped downward into a pit. Soon, however, his pupils dilated; objects began to appear. They came out one by one at first, then a whole cluster in a rush. All he saw at first was a dancing gleam of orange where firelight flickered in the grate on the opposite side of the room. Then the gloom paled rapidly, and he saw — so suddenly that she seemed to appear by magic, materialized out of empty air — a Negro woman turned sideways in her chair, looking at him with a querulous expression. It was Emma.

  “Who that there?” she said.

  She had aged; she had aged indeed, so completely gaunted to skin and bones that if he were to grasp and shake her by the shoulders, Hector thought, her body beneath the voluminous skirts and petticoats would give off a dry, fusty clatter like pine kindling shaken in a sack. The cabin had that nigger smell of clean quilts and cornstarch, the walls covered with newspapers; beyond Emma’s shoulder a headline shouted the loss of the Maine with an exclamation-point six inches tall. She looked at him, the face like a mummy’s face behind octagonal spectacle frames, the skin stretched nearly transparent over Indian cheekbones, the headrag drawn so tightly over her scalp that it shone like naked bone. Mrs Wingate would look like this if she had lived, he thought, for they were of an age.

  “It’s me, Emma,” he said. “Ive come to see you.”

  Perhaps it was his voice that caused it, he told himself afterwards, alone in his room, still panting from the two-mile run down the dusty road; he had not spoken in such a long time, it probably sounded as creaky as an unused hinge. Or perhaps, like him — for he stood in the doorway with the light at his back — she had to wait for her pupils to dilate after having looked for so long into the soft orange gleam and flicker of the fire. First there had been blackness, a sense of a presence there, a shape, and then she had blinked and seen a strange, bearded white man standing in her cabin door where no one dared to come. At any rate, whatever caused it, as soon as he had spoken Emma threw up both hands, the palms showing pink in the gloom, like dancing flames with the reflection of the fire, and began to scream.

  “I knows you!” she cried. “I knows you, old Satan: I knows you walks the earth lak a natural man!” She tumbled from the chair, fell to her knees on the hearth, and covered her eyes with her palms, both hands beneath the spectacle frames. “Save me, Lord Jesus! Save me!” The two eyepieces were over the backs of her hands, one empty, innocent of glass, the other holding its shattered star which flickered rose and yellow in the firelight. As Hector turned, already running, he heard her beginning to pray in earnest: “The Lord is my shepherd: I shall not want. I’ll lay down in the pasture and store my soul.”

  The hot dust of the road was ankle deep in places. It filled his carpet slippers as he ran, each grain like a live spark. But he did not mind. He ran head-down, fists clenched, numb with terror at what he had seen, at having been identified with the devil, the powers of darkness. Ahead, at the side of the road, a Negro boy shuffled the dust, moving his feet in time with the words he sang:

  I knows, hey I knows a woman got gret big legs

  Takes little bitty steps lak she walking on eggs

  — I’m telling you.

  When Hector came past, his carpet slippers pounding the road in a series of small explosions, each with its accompanying puff of dust at the heels like smoke, the voice cut off abruptly. The boy stood stock still, looking after him, halted in midstride, eyes bulged; “What was that?” he said aloud. Hector ran on. A brown thrasher sat on a rail fence beside the road, the steady yellow bead of its eye watching him approach, the long bill turning in profile until he came abreast: whereupon the bird sprang away from the rail with a single quick motion, its wings and narrow tail the color of dusty cinnamon, and was gone. Thus, in Hector’s mind when he looked back on it later, he had been rejected in his time of need, both by mankind and by the woodland creatures he had befriended during the time of snow and ice, leaving his cozy nestled box to do so. He ran on.

  He had run from things all his life, in one way or another, but never as far and as hard as this. When he was back at the house, safe in his room, the door bolted behind him, the curtains drawn, he lay on the bed, breathing hoarsely from the exertion and from fright, which was still upon him. It gripped him like a hand gripping his heart, and it was more than physical; it was spiritual fright as well, so to speak. Samuel and Emma had been a possible wedge of re-entry into the world. Needing each other the way all three of them did, almost anything might have come of the relationship. But the moment he made his first attempt at comfort, concerning himself even for an instant with another person’s troubles, he heard himself identified with Satan.

  ‘No wonder I ran,’ he told himself. ‘And besides, it may be true for all I know.’

  So now his renunciation was complete; he abandoned the walks and never left the house again. He had a world of his own, right here in the room, a world with a population of two — or one and a half, more strictly speaking; or even one and a quarter, to stretch it finer — withdrawn from the public eye and the heat of the sun. Since he seldom came downstairs any more, not even for meals, Mrs Sturgis sent up a tray three times a day, with instructions that it be placed on a chair in the hall outside his door. He left it untouched more often than not; usually he did not bother to lift the napkin and see what was there. These nights when she tiptoed across the hall there was nothing for Mrs Sturgis to hear, only the sound of his breathing. The one-sided conversations, on which she had eavesdropped for so many months, making of them what little she possibly could, had been discontinued.

  Day and night he lay on the bed or sat in the chair beside the curtained window. He believed he never slept (he did sleep very little, it was true) and he moved as seldom as possible, for motion made his head ache. Though his education had not included a course in anatomy or even zoology, he had heard or read somewhere that the brain had lobes. He reasoned that there were eight of these, distributed among the semi-quarters of his cranium; he could feel them individually throb an
d ache, and when he moved they rubbed against the incasing bone and became inflamed, particularly the one above his right eye. His brain was like a badly mangled octopus, nursing its eight throbbing stumps.

  Now that he had gone back into his box, Bristol’s interest flared again. They had second-hand reports from their servants, who had them first-hand from the Sturgis servants. “What do you suppose he really does in there?” they wanted to know. They had rejected all the talk about a ghost, not only because it was improbable, but also — even mainly — because they were tired of it. They were agreed on one thing, however: “He’s crazy as a betsy bug, and always was.”

  Professor Rosenbach, now superintendent of the Bristol public schools, was a prime source of information. He still wore the chinking watch-fob and the beaker scar, and he looked more severely military than ever, with his roach of grizzled hair and his neatly clipped beard which he stroked beneath the chin with the backs of his fingers. He dressed invariably in gray and wore facings on his vest.

  “Ah yes,” he said. “I tutored him in his childhood, as a favor to his grandmother Mrs Wingate. There was a lady of the old school … Yes, I tutored him. And let me tell you, in all confidence, there was something wrong with that one from the start. I at least was never sanguine in my expectations where he was concerned. Youve noticed his eyes? Shifty. He could never look at me squarely. You know what I mean?” (At this point the listener would attempt to look at the professor ‘squarely,’ but it never came off very well.) “I always tell by the eyes, and his were shifty. I predicted trouble from the outset. And I was right, sir; I was right.”

  That was more or less the way they talked before the final flare and sputter. Hector of course knew nothing of it. Even if he had known, it would have seemed an anticlimax after having been prayed against as the devil himself come up to walk the earth like a natural man. As it was, his mind was occupied with other things.

  He had foreseen the time when Ella would be gone from him, his world reduced to a population of one, and now that time was at hand. It was August again, the month of her death, the dry, heat-labored climax of the long delta summer. Her voice was reduced to the tiniest, sibilant vibration, like a breath against harp strings or the sympathetic humming of a piano when an instrument across the room is struck. There were no words now, only a vague intensity, stepped up or diminished to indicate approval or dislike. All that week she was with him, and she made herself visible at last; for now there were no longer any grounds for modesty. She was only a shimmer of light, a phosphorescent glow of putrefaction.

  She was so calm, so comforting all through that final week, like a woman dismissing a lover who has been tender. But on the final night, the anniversary of her death, she seemed to be trying to tell him something. She buzzed and hummed with urgency:

  — Zezz, zezz.

  “What is it, Ella? What is it you want?”

  — Zezz, zezz.

  The shimmer kept moving insistently to the window and back. Finally Hector got up; he went to the window, parted the curtains slightly, and looked out. But there was nothing. The street was empty and all the houses were dark. Zezz, zezz! The moon had risen late; it hung in the trees across the way, swollen into the third quarter, gibbous and tinged with green, flooding the yard with a thick rich golden light.

  “I dont understand,” he said.

  But she hummed and buzzed, urging him on, and he put his hand out, holding the curtain aside. The vibration grew more intense like a bumblebee:

  — Zezz! Zezz!

  His hand moved along the velvet, fumbling, and when it touched the curtain rope the humming suddenly pitched itself an octave higher, insistent, exultant, a high thin tremulous whine; Yezz! Yezz! The line of light danced up and down and vibrated rapidly, shimmering and humming affirmation: Yezz! Yezz! Then he understood.

  She had never left the room with him, and in fact he had thought perhaps the regulations allowed her no existence outside it. But now she did. She led the way, first into the hall, then down it to the door beside the stairwell. He followed, carrying the length of silken rope which he had torn loose from the curtain and the wall; it hung slick and heavy, thick-bodied, like a dead moccasin. As he climbed the attic stairs the musty odor of desolation brought him a memory of childhood, of afternoons when he was a boy and stole away from Emma during naptime; he had crept up here to be alone; he had called it his kingdom.

  There was a scurrying of mice. A dressmaker’s dummy, like a headless statue, thrust its bosom to the moonlight streaming through the mansard window. Big, gilt-framed paintings, long since tarnished, leaned against the wall, indistinguishable under their layers of dust. Four generations of discarded furniture loomed in jagged silhouette, including a table laid on its back, its four legs in the air. Behind the wainscot the mice made frantic scrabbling sounds. He could imagine them crouched in fear or reared back on their haunches, twitching their whiskers, their eyes like bright little blisters of jet, their ears pricked as they listened to the footsteps of the invader who had returned after all these years, a grown man.

  Hector had no will now; he only followed the glimmer, moving like a man in a dream while it led him to the proper rafter, one with a chair at hand. He climbed up, balancing carefully because the chair was frail, put the rope over the rafter, knotted the dangling ends together, then knotted them again, less than a foot above, and with the abrupt deliberation of a housewife threading a needle, put his head through the double strand between the knots. It was a close fit, and he had trouble getting the bottom knot past his chin. Looking down and sideways, with his neck in the silken yoke, he saw that the glimmer was almost gone. Her year was almost up, to the hour; she was only a pale line of light, but the vibration was sharp and steady with approval.

  He did not hesitate, for he was quite sure of himself. But the moment he let down, feeling the chair tip backward from his kick, something happened that caused him to change his mind. The vibration switched to a new key; it was more like laughter now — the same mocking laughter he had heard almost a year ago, pitched on a rising note. ‘This is wrong,’ he tried to say, but the words would not come past the broken voice-box. Then he stopped hearing the laughter. He was alone for an instant of cold and terrible breakage, the grinding thorax and the pounding blood.

  But it was only an instant. After its dreadful dance, like a limber-jointed doll jerked on a string, the body turned slowly, first one way, then another, more dreamy than fretful, and then hung motionless, the head thrown sideways and joined to the long wrung neck at a crazy angle, the lower knot pulled tightly under one ear, the rope like an iron bar hooked over the rafter. The attic was deathly still for a term, but after another interval of tentative scurrying, the mice came out to play.

  Two days later Mrs Sturgis was still trying to decide whether to notify the sheriff that Hector was missing. She thought that he had wandered off on one of his walks and then had just kept going. She believed that he would be back soon, and she still did not want to antagonize him, especially in the way a searching-party would do. Perhaps, indeed, this was the final crisis that would restore him, just as certain illnesses develop the fever which is their only cure. By sundown of the second day, however, she had changed her mind; she was on her way to the telephone when there was a sudden commotion, a steady, hysterical bellering from the top of the house. It was the upstairs maid, who had been sent into the attic by the cook.

  “Go up there and see,” the cook had said. “It smells to me like something must have died.”

  Harry Barnes came with the sheriff to cut him down, and they buried him the following afternoon. Mr Barnes took considerable pains with what he always called the ‘arrangements.’ In after years he spoke of it as his masterpiece. “I really fixed him nice,” he said. “And if you dont think I had a job on my hands, try hanging a side of beef in a shut-up attic for two hot days in middle August and see what kind of shape it’s in when you go to take it down. There’s more to this profession than folks know.�
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  For the rest of that year, and for the first six months of the year that followed, people in Bristol and surrounding towns heard and retold the story in at least a dozen versions, each a shade more improbable than the one that went before. Then it paled; they had overdone it, exhausted its possibilities with too much enthusiasm, in much the same way as they had done in Ella’s case. When his mother presented the pictorial maps to the city and they were placed on display it was revived, though no one who had known the original facts would have recognized the ones that were sworn to then. Years afterward, while the maps collected dust in the foyer of the city hall, and still later, when they were put into the cupola where pigeons swooped and fluttered and cooed in organ tones, it was mentioned occasionally that Mrs Sturgis had had a wayward son who had been involved in some sort of scandal: “He took some money or something. Maybe it was a woman caused it: I dont know.” It was all quite obscure. Finally they classified it under sorrow: “She had some kind of sorrow in her life. A son went crazy or something: I dont know.” It was rarely mentioned. Longevity conquers scandal every time.

  Then she died too, and the house was razed, the grounds converted into a public park. Two years ago a man came down from Memphis, an art critic, or so he called himself, a columnist from one of the papers; he had heard about the maps. They got them out of the cupola for him and dusted them off, the multi-colored one-to-one-hundred representations of people going about their joys and griefs, seen on the streets of Bristol from above. He called his column “The Last Romantic” and spoke of Hector Sturgis as an undiscovered genius. There was a revival of interest in the maps; they stayed on display in the foyer again for a while. But then it faded, even faster than before, and they were put away. Maybe the man was just wanting to fill a column. Certainly they are romantic in a different way from our current ‘tough-minded’ brand of that endemic sickness. Perhaps when their true time comes, if it does come, they will be brought down to stay.