On Agate Hill

by Lee Smith

  Oh I know what they say about me in town. I know I am old and sick. Yet inside I am just the same and I’ll swear it, still crazy with love and pain, still wanting who knows what. I am not sure whatever happened to that smart girl in between, the one who kept the Bobcat School and worked at the store wrapping parcels and adding up sums in her head. It seems like only yesterday that she walked out the door and got lost someplace down that old Indian trail.

  But I would do it all again, every bit of it, I would lose him again just to have him again for an hour, for a minute, for even a second. I would do it all again just to see his face. My demon lover my Jacky boy my husband sometimes I think I dreamed you up.

  Oh Molly Petree, who were you? Strange and willful child

  This is the box of her life

  This is her diary

  In fact everything in this cubbyhole is exactly the same, like the village in the paperweight Ben Valiant gave me so long ago, I don’t know where that has got to now. I believe I left it at Chattie’s house up on Bobcat. But here is the box containing our collection of phenomena, which you may recall — the man doll Robert E. Lee still vanquished, tossed in a heap with Margaret and Fleur those beautiful brides, all vanquished, and so long dead. The photograph of Simon Black (how young he was!) and my father (how handsome!) gone off to war. The filigree casket of fool’s gold, three poetry books, two catechisms, the green liqueur glass from Venice, my mother’s silver hairbrush. A sizable number of animal bones, especially jawbones, skulls, and feet, though I gave the Yankee hand to Mary White, and where is it now? Ensconced in the world of light.

  There is one new addition to this box of phenomena which you have not yet seen. Here. Isn’t it heavy, surprisingly heavy? It is a heart-shaped stirrup forged by Simon Black for my mother, Alice Heart, years ago at Perdido, when they were about ten years old. Children. They were just children. I know all about it now. I know the whole story of Simon Black.

  For soon after my return to Agate Hill, I woke up in the night and went down to lie beside him, a thing I could never have imagined doing in all my life. Yet I found there an indescribable sweetness and peace, a sort of joy, and I stayed with him until his death, flesh to flesh, bone to bone, pressing my body against his, the whole long fragile length of him, for it meant nothing now, and everything — it was the least that I could do. Sometimes I read poetry aloud from Uncle Junius’s books, Shakespeare and Robert Burns and Byron and Wordsworth, and Simon Black seemed to like this, the sound of the words, though he was not an educated man. Henry and Juney took care of us. At the end, I don’t believe Simon Black knew who I was, and I am not sure I knew who I was either.

  I lay beside him as he died, early on a midsummer morning. First light, the birds going wild in the trees. He had lain unconscious for several days. The perfume of Fannie’s Aurora rose filled the room, for it was blooming just outside the open window. I had noted it as I woke and slept and woke and slept throughout that whole long night, for I slept lightly then, my ear pressed against the bony cage of his ribs. The evening star still hung in the sky when I woke that last time to realize that Simon had slipped away. I lay beside him while the evening star faded and the yard filled with sunshine slanting in our window and across the bed. What a man he was. I lay beside him while all the changes took place, his ravaged body cooling, his thin arm growing stiff across my breast. We are like a sarcophagus, I thought, remembering the Etruscan tombs in Miss Lovinia Newberry’s art class at Gatewood, so long ago. Now we are the sarcophagus itself. After a time, Juney came to stand beside the bed, for Juney always knows everything, and after some more time, he went for Henry. They had to help me break away from Simon’s last embrace.

  “Molly.” Henry opened the drawer of the table beside the bed and took out the pigskin case which Simon had always kept there. “Open it,” he said. “It is for you.”

  I took the case and sat up beside Simon and untied the leather strips which bound it. There was the stirrup, and there was this letter to me, penned in his careful hand.

  • • •

  January 1, 1907

  My Darling Molly,

  I shall be gone when you read these words, yet you shall know the high esteem in which I hold you, the love I have carried like a precious vessel for you always, a love perhaps more perfect still for its impossibility upon this ravaged earth. Time and again I have intended to explain myself to you, yet I am a man of actions, not words, as you may surmise. But the time draws nigh. It is my intention therefore to make a full accounting of myself humbly and forthrightly before you who remain the very center of my being, as I remain your obedient servant.

  Let us go straight to the source and center of my greatest shame, the moment when your father lay dying in the yard of the Harper farmplace at Bentonville, one hand mangled and one leg amputated and his stomach pierced by a bullet meant for me. “Charlie,” I said, “By God I am sorry, I did not mean to do it,” for I had wheeled my horse on instinct as we proceeded up the muddy road through the incessant rain to join Hardee’s command, myself at the head of the column, and he had taken the sharpshooter’s fire. This I had done though Charles had saved my life at Trevillian Station, wounding himself at the time. “Charlie, can you hear me?” I kept saying into his ear, for the groans of the dying all around us and the screams of those undergoing amputation in the upstairs rooms of the Harper house were horrible. Legs came flying out the windows into a pile which grew as high as the smokehouse. A boy sitting next to me observed that it was easy to tell the leg of a cavalryman from that of an infantryman, the legs of the horsemen being thin and weak, while marching had made the legs of the foot soldiers muscular. Blood lay in puddles in the yard around us.

  “Charlie,” I said though his face was white as paper and his chest neither rose nor fell. But suddenly Charlie’s eyelids flickered. I pressed my ear to his mouth so as to hear him if he should speak.

  “You old cuss,” he said. “Now go tell Alice . . .” Then he was gone.

  I swore a sacred oath, then and there, to look after Alice and his children.

  Still yet when the time of surrender finally came at the Bennett farmhouse scarcely one month later, I could not bring myself to dismount or go forward into the open where men of both armies milled about in fields and yard. There they stood, my brothers, hats in hand or pressed to chest, some of them weeping openly. Though many had fallen, I had been with a few of these boys since Edgefield. We had come down this long and terrible road together, and had got damn good at it too.

  There stood William Halsey with his head hanging down in the sun and his mouth hanging open like a simpleton, though he had taken the highest prize at your father’s school. I remembered him next to me in the line at Brandy Station, riding hell for leather, screaming the Rebel Yell. There stood Lonnie Ratchford and Porter Beaulieu who rode with me to steal the beef in Pennsylvania.

  But somehow I could not dismount. Nor could I remove my hat. Nor could they see me plain, you understand, for I had stayed back in a little grove of willows there by the creek, a good distance back from the house. I could see Kilpatrick there in the yard, or a man I believed to be Kilpatrick, who had recently been caught in bed with his mistress and escaped capture in his shirt-tails. They said that General Hampton had caused his own horse to buck up yesterday, so as not to have to shake hands with Kilpatrick. General Hampton was not in evidence now. We all knew that General Joe Johnson was inside, where he had been for hours. But then the door of the house opened. General Sherman stepped forth and called a man, apparently his clerk, who sprang forward, papers in hand. The door closed behind him. Officers and men standing in the Bennetts’ yard began plucking cherry blossoms as well as sprigs from the privet bushes for souvenirs. They carved pieces of bark from the large white oak tree in the yard. This sickened me.

  I could not do it, no matter what sacred oath I had sworn. I accepted neither my ten days’ rations nor my parole. Though I cannot condone my actions then or now, still I must say in my own
defense that I knew Alice and her children had been taken in and provided for by Junius Hall at Agate Hill — far more than could be said for most widows and their children in that sad time. In any case I had no choice. Dark, broken, and in despair, I was not in a fit state of mind to help anyone, even had I the means to do so, which I did not. I had nothing.

  I waited in the willows until cover of night then rode south down the Fayetteville road, one of hundreds scurrying down that rutted thoroughfare in the moonlight. No one stopped me or asked me any questions. Upon occasion it was necessary to ride around a person who had simply fallen in the road, whether dead or sleeping I could not say. The full moon sailed gaily through the puffy clouds all the while, and not for the first time I found myself thinking how beautiful the world is, how astonishingly beautiful, and yet it does not give a damn about any of us, nor any thing, nor does God, who would not be worth worshipping if he even existed, which He does not. For no god could condone such slaughter.

  Thus I did not surrender — nor have I ever surrendered — but made my way south toward Perdido through scenes of unbelievable devastation along the way, the entire countryside plundered and destroyed. Railroads were torn up, schools and churches torn down. There seemed to be no work, as everybody — negro and white alike — roamed the countryside, most of them on foot, some of them pulling carts or wagons like a mule. One old man had simply stopped, sagging between the traces while the children in his cart cried and the rest of us surged on around him. Perhaps there were good Samaritans along that route, but if so, I did not encounter them, nor was I such a Samaritan myself, I am ashamed to say. Yet I could not help it. A vast blackness had descended upon me. I cared for no one. I passed children begging beside the road, I saw children picking through the cornrows in the field for even a kernel. I did not care. I kept a store of corn in my saddlebag for Atlas, feeding it to him out of my hand when we finally stopped for the night. I made a little fire and stirred my own ration into a thick gruel.

  In three such days I reached the blackened heap of rubble and tall dreary chimneys which had been Columbia, its citizens all but disappeared, as if they had never existed. The few inhabitants I encountered were clad in little but rags and wore that blank stare I came to know well, the look of survivors of some enormous natural disaster, such as an earthquake.

  I passed down through the ravaged countryside toward Perdido, now under a low sky with a softly falling rain, the earth itself covered in a gray blanket of despair. I found conditions there to be far, far worse than they had been here, for the war had been slow to come to North Carolina, you will recall, and it had not borne the trial of the armies crossing it again and again like locusts, back and forth, taking or devastating everything in their path.

  I crossed the Saluda River on a badly constructed new bridge, the old one having been destroyed by the war, of course, as all had been destroyed by the war. I rode onto the other side remembering the days when your father and mother and I ran those woods like Indians, all day long. I remembered swimming in the black-water Saluda, I remembered the very day I taught your mother to float. We were in waist-high still black water just below the old bridge. I put my hand on the small of her back.

  “Just lean back,” I said. “Lean back, Alice, and close your eyes, and trust me. Lean far back. Let your feet rise up.” And she did, going back and back and back into the dark water with her eyes wide open, holding me in them, so that I could see myself there, upside down. Her shift floated out around her body, her hair floated out around her head. Her legs were long and white and wavy.

  “Now I’m going to move my hand,” I said, and I did, and then she was floating for one minute, two minutes, three — I don’t know how long — while the current took her downstream a little ways into deeper water and I swam to keep up, and then she was struggling and yelling, trying to put her feet down.

  “Alice, I’m coming, I’m coming,” I called. But she was furious and crying by the time I got there. I grabbed her and pulled her over toward the weedy shallows.

  “Oh Simon, damn you,” she said, but then I had her, and then I kissed her wet mouth, a kiss that she returned, twining her wet arms around my neck.

  “Alice? Simon?” Charles was upstream yelling.

  I kept on kissing her.

  “Here,” she called to him finally. “Down here, Charles,” and he came, and we never mentioned this incident again.

  Pieces of railroad track lay broken and twisted among the blooming wildflowers and thick grasses along the lush riverbank, and there on the other side I found an old countrywoman I had once known, Mrs. Hatch, who had helped in the kitchens at Perdido.

  I rode over toward her and reined in Atlas. “Can I help you there, ma’am?” I called out to her.

  She turned her worn red face up to me, blinking in the bright hot sun. Her eyes were wide and strange. “Why, he’ll be coming back directly, won’t he, sir?” she said. “I believe he will be coming home any day now.”

  “Yes ma’am, I am sure he will,” I said, tipping my hat to her, as I rode on, cursing for all those boys including myself who had gone off to fight a rich man’s war.

  I reached Perdido at dark, riding down that long allee of live oaks with my heart in my throat to find nothing but a pile of rubble, only the huge white columns standing — five out of eight — across the front of what had once been the house. Bats flew round about, swooping low. I heard noise coming from the quarters, where I found an entire townful of people, both negro and white, disporting themselves in a lawless and lewd fashion everywhere in the light of burning flares. Perdido had become notorious, an outlaw haven along the levee. Not a man among them looked familiar as several met me at gunpoint.

  Promising to take my leave, I did not, sleeping instead in the abandoned icehouse down by the river which I was fairly sure no one had yet discovered as it stood yawning dark and empty in the moonlight, vines growing across its door. I tethered Atlas inside with me, and slept with my gun in my hand. I got up before dawn and rode all about the place — my childhood’s only home, as you will recall. Perdido was once an entire town unto itself, it encompassed a whole civilization, now vanished, as if it had never been.

  I went out to the meadow where the barns and stables had stood, where I had shod so many horses, and trained others; there had been the oval track, the beautiful jumps and fences. Here I had led your mother around and around on her little gray pony Lucy, teaching her to ride. Here I had trained Desperado for Charles, from here I had ridden with him to victories at Charleston and Camden and even up in Virginia.

  My father’s blacksmith shop was still standing, again in some sort of use. Despite the risk I dismounted and ducked inside. Here I could see him yet, my huge cruel silent father, hammer raised above the glowing forge. May the Devil take him! I thought. Here I had dodged his blows yet learned my craft, and it came back to me then that in fact I had once had a craft, other than war I mean, for war will take a man over utterly, especially if one is good at it, as I had proved to be. Upon impulse I lifted up a rock in the hearth and there it was, Alice’s little stirrup in the place where I had hid it years before. I put it in my pocket and was leaving as an old man appeared in the doorway to ask what I was doing there, and I said I had used to live on the place, and he said I had best be on my way then. So I left, in fact I could not leave fast enough, suddenly, spurring Atlas straight down the middle of the long allee of oaks, and be damned. The hell with it.

  I would never go back. I had never been a member of that family, no matter how much I had willed it so. I had been neither brother nor sister nor lover, I had been more like a body slave with no knowledge of his enslavement, little more than the negroes on this place. And I had remained enslaved by it, by the very idea of Perdido, all these years. Such a child had I been, such a boy, and then I had gone to war and become another thing altogether, a horrible thing. I could not believe I was still alive. I had no wish to be alive. I carried Alice’s little stirrup in my pocket as I h
eaded down the levee and into the world, suddenly resolved to find another country altogether. For I had no hope and nothing to lose — a condition of total freedom, as I came to realize.

  I was headed for Texas, from whence I planned to travel to Mexico — an idea much in the air at that time, put forward by many of our most illustrious leaders such as General Jo Shelby of Kentucky and our own General Wade Hampton himself, who had reputedly offered to take President Jefferson Davis with him.

  Such was my plan until I fell in with a man at a public house who was bound for Brazil, his saddlebags full of rattlesnake watermelon seeds, a fruit he planned to introduce there in partnership with his brother, already established and farming. He gave me an article written by his brother which described Brazil in the most glowing terms, which somehow burned their way into my perhaps fevered brain: “Who can picture, who can paint nature as here exhibited? With wonder, admiration, and reverential awe, one may contemplate the vastness with which he finds himself here surrounded, the profusion of nature’s bounties, and sublimity of scenery, but to describe them, to picture them as they are, is beyond the scope of human capacity. Here we behold the great Amazon, by far the largest river in the world, located in the center of the world, with its vast tributaries embracing more than two million square miles, teeming with animal and vegetable life; a world of eternal verdure and perennial spring, of whose grandeur and splendor it is impossible to speak in fitting terms.”

  Another country indeed. My resolve rose to meet such eloquence.

  Consequently I turned south to New Orleans, a city which swallowed me for a time, as I was susceptible then to drink and to all manner of other vices, emerging however with a pocketful of cash and a set of blacksmithing tools for the journey.

  At that time it was not necessary to join a colony. I secured passage on a large British sailing ship, the Marmion, carrying double the load of passengers for which it had been intended, most of them men from the Confederate Army, such as myself, also cattlemen from Texas and planters from Alabama. The ship had been stripped bare during the war. We sailed without furniture, sleeping in canvas hammocks hung three deep, though I could not sleep much under those conditions. I stood at the rail for hours as we departed down the delta of the Mississippi River, my heart rising with every mile of muddy water that slid under our bow as I stood looking out at the long shining spread of water and sky before me. A storm came up just as we reached the Gulf of Mexico, driving us onto a giant sandbar already occupied by a grounded pirate ship — wreckers, they called them then. Seeing us, some of the men rushed out across the sand with their cups extended, begging piteously for water.