Eugenia took up her napkin, dabbing her cheeks and forehead. “My, but it’s nice to be back home and so much going on down here.”
The others shifted in their seats. They had been too long at too many dinners with Eugenia not to know this was the opening salvo. Presently, Uncle Tom caught on. “Uh-oh, y’all hold on to your hats, ’cause Eugenia’s fixing to let us in on what’s the latest thing in California. Hey, maybe she’s gonna talk us into some of that communal-style living they’re doing out there now. I read in Time magazine—”
“Don’t you pay a bit of attention to Tom, Genia,” Helen said, patting his arm to shut him up, which everyone knew was impossible. “You say what you want to say.”
Mr. Ben put down his fork, waiting. Miss Hattie excused herself to go get more rolls from the kitchen. This was the part Tab liked, where they would all jump on Aunt Eugenia and set her straight. It was like watching a play, being right in the middle of it and not having to say a word if she didn’t want to. She put her elbows on the table and grinned at Tina, who was not looking at her on purpose. When the grandmother frowned, she took her elbows off the table.
“I know you know all the terrible inequities we suffer down here,” Eugenia began. She would include herself when she was getting ready to tell them how they were falling short. They had heard it enough to know it was a warning of things to come. “Groups of people from all over the United States are beginning to organize. They’re getting ready to come on down here and help out.”
“Help out with what?” Tab asked.
“Why are people always wanting to come down here and help us out?” Tom said. “The last time they helped us out, half the place ended up being burned down.”
“Tom! You are such a scream. My husband is funny as Red Skelton.”
Eugenia ignored it and plowed ahead. “After all these years of hideous injustice, it’s high time we did something.”
“They can’t stay home and tend to their own injustices?” Tom asked.
Tab glanced at Tina and mouthed I told you so.
“Well, maybe we should do something,” Tina said, and then, head down, talking into her lap, “whatever it is you want us to do.” Aunt Eugenia reached around to give her a hug. “You would be willing to stand by me, wouldn’t you, Tina?”
“Oh sure, yes, ma’am. I sure would.”
“And you, Tab?”
Tab, trying to imitate Uncle Tom, and going for the laughs, “Oh sure, Aunt Eugenia, anything you wanted me to do. Why, if you wanted me to, I’d probably go on up to Pulaski and take a hammer to the plaque.” She had thought it a great joke, everyone at the table knowing about the plaque, knowing it was sacred to Mr. Ben and so completely out of the range of possibility. She looked around, expecting to see the others at the point of laughter at a thought so ridiculous. She imagined she might even elicit a smile from Mr. Ben. Instead, he looked gray-faced.
“Are you forgetting about your cousin John Lester?” It had been the last thing she meant to do—offend her grandfather—one more reason to hate Aunt Eugenia. “If Cousin John Lester hadn’t come along when he did, southern women might not be able to hold their heads up in public. In Cousin John Lester’s time, there was no rule of law.”
Itching to counter, Aunt Eugenia tapped her knife on the china plate, full of food she hadn’t touched. “It seems to me, southern men are threatened more than southern women. The problem has always been that southern men are scared to death to relinquish any power, sexual or otherwise, and”—she took a breath—“and Cousin John Lester was no exception.”
There was dead silence. This had to be the final straw. Tab almost laughed out loud, so thankful was she that in one fell swoop the onus had been taken off her and put where it belonged, where she knew it had belonged from the very beginning.
On the one hand, Aunt Eugenia had insulted Cousin John Lester, and on the other, she had said “sexual” at the dinner table—like throwing up all over the Jell-O salad.
Mr. Ben had been born a few years after Reconstruction ended. Before he was old enough to sit a horse, he had been dipped headfirst into the well of family tales and had come up drenched, ready to shake off any excess onto the next generations. He had grown up with stories of the Klan, hooded and ghostlike, sweeping down in the night, saving his aunts and cousins from marauding colored people just freed from slavery and not knowing what to do with themselves but to go out and kill white people. It was not their fault, he had explained to Tab; it was just the nature of things.
At an age when the greater meaning of controversy is lost in the thrill of the fight, Tab wiggled in her chair and brought the napkin in her lap up to her face, pretending to cough, not being able to control the smile that was showing itself.
“Genia, what has got into you?” Miss Hattie whispered across the table.
“She’s developed some kinda familial death wish is all I can figure,” Helen said, not whispering at all.
Now Charles cleared his throat to speak for the first time, measuring every word. “Well now, Dad . . .” He pushed back slightly from the table, studying his half- eaten dinner. Tab still held the napkin over her mouth, watching him, disappointed that her father would stop the argument, like he always did. “You know, a lot of people, and certainly all of us here at this table, consider the Ku Klux Klan a group of—well, the Ku Klux Klan today”—he paused to select his words carefully—“a group of redneck rabble-rousers.” He qualified immediately. “Now I’m talking about the Klan today, certainly not the Klan of Cousin John Lester’s day.”
“Rabble-rousers are they? I don’t give a tinker’s damn about the Klan today, but Cousin John Lester—” He slammed down his napkin. “Miss Hattie, I’ll have my dessert in the library.”
And then, as if tuning in for the first time, Val got in on the act by seeming to think he was owed some explanation. Since he was sitting next to Tab, he turned to her. “You know, Tab, I’m having trouble following the family tree in this particular instance. Just who is, or was, your venerable cousin John Lester?”
Tab, hoping to make it up to her grandfather, “Oh, Cousin John Lester, nobody better than him. He was our first cousin and one of the five original founding fathers of the Ku Klux Klan.”
Val turned as white as a sheet—it was true—his sparkling Superman eyes popping. He coughed to regain his voice and, in what he must have hoped would sound like unflappable academia, “You never mentioned that, Eugenia.”
“Well, he wasn’t exactly my first cousin,” Tab was rambling on. “Course he couldn’t be. He was probably my second or third cousin, but we are very kin in some way.” She grinned at her grandmother.
Eugenia, in turn, bore up as well as could be expected under this heretofore-unopened closet skeleton that had just jumped out at poor Uncle Val like some dangling bloody body to fly in the face of his scholarly self.
“I really never thought . . . thought about it, Val. It’s just one of those things one lives with.”
Helen hooted. “You never thought to tell Val, of all people, about John Lester?”
Aunt Eugenia snapped back, “I never saw you broadcasting it around the neighborhood, Helen.”
Helen had settled back into eating and had a bite of roast in her mouth, but couldn’t let it pass. “What’s to tell? Everybody around here already knows. Besides, around here we already know we aren’t perfect”—a grin to Tom.
Val cleared his throat again, trying to remain calm. “You never thought to tell me that you were kin to one of the founding fathers of the Klan?”
And Tab, “Heck, that’s no secret. It started right up there in Pulaski, not two hours from our doorstep. I been up there to see it.”
“I think I’ve lost my appetite.” Val got his hurt self up out of his chair and retired to their upstairs bedroom.
Aunt Eugenia trailed behind, iced tea glass in hand. “Now darling, I told you when we married that my past was . . . well, marred.”
“I thought you meant ordinary
things, being southern, having unresolved family issues.”
“Is that California talk, ‘unresolved family issues’? Is he talking about us?” Uncle Tom wanted to know as he helped himself to more crowder peas.
It was customary to have dinners like this when Aunt Eugenia came to town.
CHAPTER 6
Shiloh
BY THE TIME THEY MOVED OUT to the porch for ice cream, the mood had taken a 180-degree turn. “Discussions,” as Miss Hattie called them, just happened with Eugenia. “You have to get on with it, or your whole life will end up being one big discussion, round and round all the time, because the minute you say black, Eugenia is bound to say white.”
Miss Hattie took the top off the freezer and pulled out the dasher. “You let Eugenia worry you, and you’ll end up frazzle-minded.” She motioned for Tina to come hold the dasher while she used a spoon to scrape ice cream off into the canister. “Mind you hold it still. I don’t want any rock salt in my cream. Hand me those bowls over there, Tab.” She took the dasher from Tina and laid it aside, then began filling bowls, which she gave, one by one, to Tina and Tab to pass out to the yard children, if they would come and sit quietly on the front steps to eat.
Eugenia came out on the porch without Val. He was in the middle of a much-needed rest, she said. Mr. Ben was in his study. Miss Hattie spooned out an extra-large portion and sent Tab in with it.
Tab closed the screened door, the porch voices fading as she walked the long hall to the back of the house. She felt, as she always felt when she visited with him, as if she were walking back in time to meet him. The grandfather clock was striking the quarter hour as she passed. A cool, almost cold, breeze from some other place in the house drifted by. Opening the door to his study made her feel she was entering another house, or maybe another place altogether—old light that had faded everything to quiet colors, old air that had been used and reused. Legal bookcases were stacked on two walls. There were the requisite volumes of Lee, of Stonewall, of Johnston, the Joel Chandler Harris-edited set of The Library of Southern Literature, and the complete Photographic History of the Civil War, but most of the books were about leaders and battles in the Tennessee Valley, where he lived, where he and his family had spent generations.
Above one bookcase was a large portrait of Lee on Traveler. Mr. Ben sat in an old swivel chair, one he had brought from the farm office when he retired. His legs were crossed and stretched out in front of him. His head was bent down to his book, his chin cutting into the stiff white collar of his dress shirt. On rare occasions, she had seen him take off his suit coat, but she had never seen him without his tie and vest and dress shirt. In lean times, the whole assemblage might be a little threadbare, but it was always clean and pressed, and a formidable layer of protection against those who might imagine familiarity.
He had felt that passing everything on to his elder son and giving up control would be distressing. He had heard that was sometimes the case. In reality, it had been just the opposite. He was free to do as he pleased and let his son worry about the future. Now he was rereading his copy of Cleburne and His Command.
Tab closed the door quietly. She brought the ice cream in and set it on the desk, being careful not to speak unless he spoke. He had opened the windows over the desk, and a fan sat on top of it, turning slowly back and forth, pulling in scents from the backyard garden. Tab turned to go and was almost out the door before he said, “My father’s company was positioned to the right of Cleburne’s Brigade, you know.”
She turned around and came back to him, waiting for one of his stories. She loved this one. “Yes, sir,” she said. “Company A, Sixteenth Alabama Infantry.” She had heard it many times, but it didn’t matter. She was partial to the ones he told and retold.
“Up at Shiloh.”
“Yes, sir, just down the river apiece,” she said. She walked over and pulled the old leather ottoman away from the other end of the room to take a seat opposite him.
He looked up from the book and stared out the window at the backyard garden Miss Hattie kept each summer. Irises were growing along the border of flagstones that led to the center walk-around. Purple thrift surrounded the birdbath. Cosmos was beginning to stick up behind a border of candytuft. Pollen and dust drifted down through shafts of sunlight and he saw artillery smoke rising off the hills to the east, along the Tennessee River. “It was a beautiful day, weather like this,” he said. “I have always wondered why the Lord visited such death and destruction upon us on a day like this. He told me he stepped in a clump of wildflowers growing near the creekbed when his company was given the order to form up. Said he could hear the howitzers firing down the line as they moved east up near Owl Creek.”
Mr. Ben had grown up and grown old with the stories of his father’s war, and on his deathbed, when he was delirious, his father had gone back there one last time to live out that day—the high point or the low point of his life—there in the dirt and sweat and death that was the Battle of Shiloh. Mr. Ben had been a young man when he sat by his father’s bedside and listened for the last time. “It was surprise we had on our side,” he said now. “The Yanks never knew we were coming.”
“We had to attack before the Yanks could bring up reinforcements,” Tab said. “They were coming upriver with reinforcements. When was it his brother Arthur got there?”
Mr. Ben was still watching the garden. “His brother Arthur, your great-great-uncle, he was just seventeen. He had been home on sick leave—had dysentery. People did that back then, left their company and came home on leave.” She nodded her head. She knew all about it. “A few days before, he had heard troops were massing up for a big battle. His brother Charles was still up there. Arthur got out of his sick bed and put on his uniform and left to rejoin them. He walked the eighteen miles into Bainbridge, had one of the old fishermen row him down river to a place he could cross to the south and rejoin his company—had to skirt around the Union gunboats.”
Tab had leaned forward and put her elbows on her knees, her head in her hands. She could smell the smoke and hear a saber rattling as a courier dashed by on his horse, carrying orders to the other end of the line. His mount’s neck arched back as the courier momentarily reined in to appraise the situation, then dashed off, hoofs spitting out dirt. “Course, his mama didn’t want him to go,” she said. She could see Arthur—sallow-cheeked, turning his back on his mother, walking down the long drive, and disappearing into the countryside. “She stood in the door and cried when he left, knowing he might not come back.” She watched Mr. Ben. “And he was very handsome. At seventeen, he was very handsome.”
“I showed you that picture of him, didn’t I?” Mr. Ben said. She nodded. She had studied the picture, had imagined having a boyfriend like Arthur, curly blond hair, his gray private’s hat sitting at a jaunty angle, smiling out at her. She had never seen another picture of a soldier smiling. Soldiers didn’t usually smile in pictures. He seemed bursting with confidence, with pride at being permitted to take part in what was about to happen. She waited for the charge to commence.
“It was early morning when he got there. It’s not that far, you know. He had brought back, in his haversack, some tea cakes his mother had made with the last of the sugar she had. Eventually, he found his brother. They sat down under a giant poplar and ate every last one of them—the tea cakes.” Mr. Ben watched blue jays light on Miss Hattie’s birdbath. Tiny sprays of water caught the sunlight as the birds fluttered their wings, cooling themselves. “My father told me he should have saved some, but he was always glad they ate all of them right then and there.
“Arthur had been feverish, but he had kept saying he was all right. They had filled their canteens out of the creek right before they heard the command to form up and start moving.” Mr. Ben looked away from the window and down at Tab. “The infantry line alone was almost three miles long. The Yankees were so surprised, they had left water boiling on their campfires and beans cooking in their pots. Our boys swarmed like mosquitoes—shoo
ting and yelling. They ran past overturned pots of beans, grabbing up blankets and canteens left in their wake, running forward, almost laughing at the ease of it. Bullets were whizzing by but never made a mark. Once, a cannonball came so close to my father, he could feel the wind of it.”
“But when they came to the Sunken Road,” she said, “to the Hornet’s Nest?”
“Then they came to the Sunken Road. Suddenly, there rose up out of the road a line of Yanks, right in their path, firing at close range and then ducking back down for cover. Whole lines of men fell, and those who were left retreated to reload and charge again.”
“Arthur was too quick with his reloading,” she said.
“Arthur had reloaded the new Springfield his father had given him. Charles took longer because his was an old smoothbore. He ran to catch up. He wanted to kneel and fire alongside his brother. Just as he got there, Arthur fell, a hole blown in his neck, his head lying in a small patch of violets and the violets turning red. He remembered seeing the violets as he knelt down beside Arthur.”
“Arthur’s eyes were open, but he couldn’t say anything, just looked up at his brother,” she said, her voice cracking. She was seeing the beautiful blue eyes, searching and desperate, the blood running down his neck, soaking the blond curls.
“In the next moment, my father saw a line of boots and blue pants running toward him and he felt someone grab him and pull him backward toward the cover of the trees.
“When they charged again, he ran to the spot where he thought he had last seen Arthur. By this time, there were bodies all around.” Mr. Ben looked out at the garden again. “Couldn’t even find the violets. He was searching, turning over bodies, when he heard the order to fall back.
“After that, their company waited hours for the artillery—sixty-two pieces, so they say—to clear a path, throwing shells into the breech, obliterating everything.
“By then, it was late afternoon and dark was coming on. By then, there was no way of telling. Buell had come up to reinforce Grant.” Mr. Ben looked down at his book, seeming to have finished with the story.
The Summer We Got Saved Page 4