The Year of Jubilo

by Bahr, Howard;

  Then he thought about how it would be if he were a gray gander, and what he might see from aloft. He imagined the silence, the cool night air passing over him—and down below, the broad land revealed in starlight, crossed and recrossed by the thin, pale ribbons of roads—all of them leading somewhere, for somebody. And all across the earth the tiny, struggling figures of men caught up in a great migration of their own, all walking out of the long night toward a morning they had created for themselves from the darkness.

  Gawain moved under the quilt, stretched-his body and felt the muscles tighten in his legs. It was good to be there, drowsy and at peace, with the mockingbird singing and the whippoorwill querying away out in the overgrown fields, and his own people at hand to watch after him. Then he was dreaming again, and in the dream, a door opened somewhere, the hinges groaning softly, then the creak of a board, and a smell like soap, and the soft smell a woman has when she has been asleep for a while on a summer’s night—something in the hair, the flesh gone warm with sleeping, a residue of dreams. He woke to the sound of her settling into the rocking chair by his head.

  “Dell ain’t comin home,” she said. “He ain’t ever comin home again.”

  “You don’t know that,” he said, turning his head a little. The moon had risen, and he could see her by the pale light of it; she wore a cotton gown washed to the color and thinness of smoke.

  “I had a dream of him,” she said after a moment. “Back in the early spring. In the dream, I couldn’t see his face.”

  “Dreams don’t mean anything,” said Gawain, but she went on, her voice in a whisper: “Then last month, I saw him settin on the bed. He was gaunted, like you are. I woke up sayin his name, but he was gone. That was the last time he’ll ever come. I know that.”

  “Rena, it’s a long way from Carolina,” he said.

  She didn’t answer, but began to rock slowly, a board creaking under the chair. In a moment, she said, “You don’t mind, I’ll set here awhile.”

  “No, I don’t mind. It is a good sound.”

  The moon rose, the stars burned on without heat, and under them, the whippoorwill called, and frogs in the ditches, and the mockingbird sang. At last the night grew late, and all things fell silent, and mist rose from the fields, and the road lay white in the starlight. Gawain listened to the woman’s rocking for a long time and found a comfort in it. When he slept, he dreamed of high places, and clouds feathering across the moon like geese. He woke at break of day, and she was gone.

  At breakfast, she clattered pots and pans around the hearth and would not look at him. Then, when the children were gone out in the yard, and the old mother sat at the table muttering to herself, and Gawain had pulled on his coat, she turned to him. She had his canteen, filled with sweet spring water, and a bag of coffee, and four biscuits wrapped in a rag.

  “This is for you, along the way,” she said, and lowered her eyes.

  “I am obliged to you,” he said. “Rena—”

  She shook her head to silence him. She was wearing her dress now, shapeless, of a faded brown, and her feet were bare. “Now, go on,” she said.

  So he went on his way, and they followed him a little distance up the road: the wife, the old mother, the three children, the dogs, a kitten, a hen—and the dark, empty shape of his cousin who was not home. Just before Gawain passed out of sight around a bend in the road, he looked back and saw them standing all together, the women’s hands gathered in their aprons.

  Now the sun was climbing toward the meridian, and the day promised hot and fair. It would be his last day on the road; when this sun went down he would be in Cumberland. The knowledge stirred in him a feeling he could not put a name to. After so long a time, he could not pretend to know what he felt about anything.

  II

  Gawain Harper had just turned thirty-seven that beguiling afternoon in April 1862, when he and Sir Niles Reddick and young Tom Fitter, the mathematics professor at the Academy, presented themselves to the Confederate enrolling officers at the courthouse. Each of these gentlemen had delayed as long as he could, but now could delay no longer. They were among a dwindling minority of able-bodied Cumberland men who had resisted joining the service until the moment when their personal honor could no longer be sustained without it. Now they were tired of making excuses, tired of intellectual evasion, and they were especially tired of patriotic women. In the final tally, Gawain and Sir Niles and young Fitter joined the Confederate Army—would have joined any army that was handy, whatever its cause or banners—to escape the women of the town and their cold stares, their comments veiled behind fans and handkerchiefs, their pernicious habit of crossing the street whenever a robust civilian slunk guiltily by. Even Morgan Rhea—who, Gawain had supposed, was old enough to know better—was a little cool when he declared his lack of soldierly ambition. Though he hoped she would come around to his view, she never did, and Gawain had come to feel like a mewling dog in her presence. Moreover, her father, Judge Nathaniel Rhea—a fire-eating state legislator and among the first to raise the shrill cry of secession—made it plain to Gawain that no gentleman would keep himself out of the army at a time when the fate of his entire civilization hung in the balance.

  Still Gawain had resisted. He was not afraid to go, he assured himself. He was sure he could endure the rigors of the field, was not unwilling to put up his life for a just cause. Yet he was not sure the cause was just, or even what it amounted to, or if it was worthy of the valuable commodity he represented in the great design. And anyway, he simply could not share in the sense of dark portent that drove so many in those days. What he knew of battles and the movement of armies he got from the newspaper, and there it all seemed little more than a remote exercise. He understood that men were killed—already there were Cumberland men who would be seen no more—but these seemed to have disappeared not into death but into some vast pen-and-ink rendering, where hundreds of men, all of whom looked exactly alike, marched stiffly among puffs of smoke. He had heard all the speeches, the rousing talk of adventure, honor, even the fun to be had in making fools of the yankees. But Gawain was not a young man any longer; his life was comfortable, suitably arranged, and it would be a great nuisance to uproot everything for a few months’ camping out. As for civilization, Gawain could not see that it was in any real danger—the war, he predicted sagely, would fizzle out by Christmas, the cosmic dust would settle, and the politicians would return to their wrangling in distant halls. And he was not afraid. He was definitely not afraid.

  Then, after supper one evening in that early April of 1862, Gawain went to call on Morgan Rhea. He presented himself to old Robert the Butler at the door, then waited, standing on the gallery, studying the Lenten darkness. Soon the moon would rise and fill the yard with shadow; for now, there was only the still night, and no voices in the grass, nor any sound except the far-off barking of a dog. Gawain moved to the edge of the gallery, put out his hand, palm outward, as if there were something in the dark he might touch. But there was only the night, warm and empty, waiting for moonrise.

  Presently, the door opened. Old Robert the Butler stood there again, solemn and erect against the dim glow of the hall lantern. “Judge is home from Jackson,” he said. “He say to give you this.” He held out a silver tray; upon it lay a sheet of foolscap, folded and sealed with wax.

  “I didn’t ask for the Judge,” said Gawain.

  “You didn’t know he was home either,” said the old man.

  Gawain took the paper. The seal was still warm. “So,” he said. “I suppose—”

  “Go on, Mist’ Gawain,” said the old man. “You won’t ever get back here if you don’t start now.” Then he closed the door.

  Gawain walked the little way back to town and sat on a bench by the courthouse and waited for the moon to come up. The square was mud in this season—deep mud churned and mingled with the leavings of horses and cattle. There were no trees, only the indistinct shapes of the buildings that the trees had gone to make room for. In the cent
er, the courthouse stood utterly dark, silent, though in the cupola the great bell huddled, waiting for the hour.

  The moon rose. It was a big moon, and as it peered over the roofs of the eastern row of buildings, the machinery in the cupola began to whirr and mutter, and in a moment the bell struck eight o’clock. Gawain counted the strokes, and as the last one faded away he took the foolscap out of his coat pocket, turned it over and over in his hand and ran his finger across the seal. At last, when the square was lit by the moon and long shadows leaned from the buildings, he broke the seal and read.

  Sir:

  If you were welcome here, you would already have been admitted. Since you have not been, you may draw whatever inference seems appropriate. Perhaps one day you will conduct yourself in such a way that, should you live, you might be welcome even here. Until that time, I remain

  Very Respectfully Yours,

  Nathaniel Rhea, Esq.

  When Gawain had read it twice, he fished in his waistcoat pocket for a lucifer match, found one, struck it against the iron leg of the bench and set the foolscap alight. In a moment, it was a rectangle of ash edged in scarlet; he let it go and watched it break up on the hard-trodden yard of the courthouse, watched the fragments drift away in the moonlight, driven by imperceptible currents in the air. He sat a while longer, then at last rose and moved across the moonlit square toward home.

  SO GAWAIN HARPER joined the Cause, whatever it might turn out to be, admitting to himself that he had no choice, and hoping he would at least have the consolation of fulfilling some unexpected destiny. He assured himself that something was happening he ought not to miss—an opportunity that would loom large in his personal history, more especially if he refused it. He recalled stirring words he’d read and taught: Shakespeare’s Henry V, Lovelace, Byron, Tennyson’s “Ulysses.” He had believed in the words, secure in his lecture hall with all the world in order, and he tried to believe them now, in the springtime of his destiny. And why not? Why were the words ever made if they could not be believed? So Gawain told himself that afternoon, as he and Fitter and Sir Niles strolled down the leaf-shaded streets toward the courthouse. After all, it was too early for the ruined ones to have returned: the crippled and sick and blind who would come in time and tap their accusing canes on the sidewalks, whose voices might have whispered in his ear of the unthinkable possibilities that awaited him.

  One of the enrolling officers was from the Twenty-first Regiment of Mississippi Infantry. This officer was appallingly young, but he had been in an actual battle and so was a veteran, and he already had the veteran’s deep contempt for civilians. Nevertheless, he was courteous and persuasive (and he did look dashing in his uniform), so Gawain and his companions signed their names in his book and, as if by magic, became privates in the Twenty-first.

  Gawain looked at his name in the book. “There,” he told Sir Niles. “That ought to satisfy the old son of a bitch.”

  The next morning, the new enlistees (there were more than a dozen, all looking a little sheepish) met at the ramshackle depot of the Mississippi Central Railroad, where a shy and inarticulate enlisted man—a corporal, they learned later—taught them how to stand in a line. That accomplished, they were free to bid farewell to their loved ones, and to the curious and the idle, while they waited for the train, which was, of course, late.

  Gawain’s Aunt Vassar was there, and his father, already befuddled by the fever spreading in his brain, and old Priam. They passed the time as if Gawain were only going up to Memphis on holiday, talking all around the reason for his leaving, not daring to look into the mystery that lay beyond the far curve of the railroad. Aunt Vassar told Gawain that she was proud of him, that she would send him a letter as soon as she knew his posting, and when he came back, my, what a grand Christmas they would have. Old Priam was solemn and decorous, standing among the white people with his buggy whip in the crook of his arm, guarding Gawain’s valise and rolled umbrella. Gawain himself was deeply embarrassed and almost wished they had not come at all; nevertheless, he held his Aunt Vassar’s hand for the first time in his life, could not seem to let it go even though he felt ridiculous. He kept thinking of his classroom at the Academy, how the sunlight was falling even then on the young faces, most of them glancing furtively out the window on this fine morning—and of old Professor Handback who would finish out the term for him, droning on through the spring in his moth-eaten frock coat, reading from his yellowed notes. How could that be happening now, apart from him? Gawain yearned deeply for that quiet, dust-smelling room with its dark wood. He would have walked home for dinner today, under the greening trees. He could see himself doing it so clearly that, for an instant, he believed there must be two Gawain Harpers, and one of them was getting the better situation. But he was the other one, that part of himself which, for reasons completely arbitrary, was having to turn its back on all that he had known.

  Morgan was nowhere to be seen, which surprised him not at all—it was another bargain he had made. He had told her nothing of his enlistment, had not even seen her again to bid farewell. Let them find out on their own. In the end (he had to admit), simple perversity had led him to that evening call, and the same perversity now made him wish he’d acted differently. He kept searching the thin crowd, hoping she might show up and at the same time hoping she wouldn’t. Damn women anyhow, he thought.

  So he was relieved when the little teakettle locomotive hove into view from the south, bringing the waiting to an end. Gawain turned to watch the approaching engine and its three varnished yellow coaches, and again he had a feeling of dislocation, as if he were hovering in time. Gawain had been a brakeman on this road, not long after the rails were laid, and he knew the engine, knew the driver and the stoker, knew deep in his memory the clashing of the link-and-pin couplers as the slack ran out and the squealing of the brakes as the brakemen tied them down. Now he would board the yellow coaches and, among crates of chickens and greasy bundles, would ride off toward the war.

  “Goodbye, my boy,” said Aunt Vassar, patting his hand.

  “Don’t you be runnin no harlots up there,” blurted his father who, it turned out, really did believe Gawain was going to Memphis on holiday.

  “Mister Harper!” said his aunt.

  “Goodbye, Aunt Vassar,” said Gawain. “Goodbye, Uncle Priam—sure you don’t want to go?”

  Old Priam smiled gravely. “Hmmm,” he said. “Naw, sir, I’d just leave a trail of broken hearts.”

  Gawain laughed in spite of the anvil set down on his heart. He approached his father, shook the old man’s hand. “So long, Papa. I’ll see you directly. I promise I won’t run any harlots.”

  “What?” the old man said.

  Aunt Vassar shook her head, reached out and touched Gawain’s face so that he blushed. “Go on, now,” she said. “You have your prayer book?”

  The engine driver blew his whistle twice, the signal for departure. “Yes’m,” said Gawain, “I have it.”

  “Don’t forget to write every day,” she said.

  Gawain was about to reply when he saw Morgan. She was walking fast down the lane that led from the depot to the square, holding up her skirts, her face in a frown. She was all in white, though she was a widow and really too old to wear white, and it wasn’t Easter yet. Some of the ladies saw her and whispered to one another behind their gloved hands.

  Well, hell, thought Gawain. Here she was, and it was time to leave. Aunt Vassar caught Gawain’s glance and turned. “Oh, my,” she said. Then she squeezed Gawain’s arm. “You didn’t tell her you enlisted, did you,” she accused.

  Gawain clamped his jaws tight and shook his head.

  “Well, you are not leaving ’til you speak to her,” said Aunt Vassar.

  All right, thought Gawain. Fine. Just fine. Then he quit thinking. He turned, slipped between the first and second coaches—there was slack, thank God—and pulled the pin from the coupling and dropped it between the wheels. He was out again in time to face Morgan Rhea.

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nbsp; Her face was pale, thin, pitted with smallpox scars, but still pretty. Her hair was dark, shot through with a little gray, though she was only thirty. Her hands were knotted tight in front of her, and when she saw Gawain, she speared him with her brown eyes.

  “Well, this is a fine thing,” she said.

  The whistle blew again and steam shot from the cylinders. The driving wheels made a tentative turn.

  “Now, Morgan—,” began Gawain.

  “No time for that,” she said. “You have made me the fool, but what’s done is done. Maybe you can still save yourself.”

  Behind them, the engine and the first car began to move. “Hey!” shouted the depot master. “Hold on there!”

  “Tell me how to do it,” said Gawain. They were close now, almost touching; he could smell the rose water on her. She opened her mouth to speak, but instead looked up the rails where the engine was chuffing away with only a third of its train. She smiled, then looked back at Gawain. He saw that, in spite of her smile, there was a shining in her eyes that might have been sorrow, regret, shame—who could tell?

  “First,” she said, “you must not blame the Judge. Do not carry that away with you. He is a hard man sometimes, but he has honor, and you must remember that.”

  “I bear him no grief,” said Gawain. “I will remember.”

  “Second,” she said. “Second, you must forgive me if I have sent you away to something … to—” Her voice broke and Gawain saw that she really was about to cry.