The Year of Jubilo
Page 5
So he was afraid here, on the old Wagner’s Stretch, even in the bright sunshine. It is the aloneness, he thought. Then he thought it was the weariness too, perhaps, or the strange silence along here where nothing seemed to live in the grass. It was the crow following through the trees. It was the strange vibration that violence left behind—the persistence of it in the air, as if only a slight tilt of the universe would bring it back again. Gawain made himself walk. He told himself that the dead were only dead after all, that whatever light may once have burned in them burned no longer, and they could do no harm. They would not rise to follow him down this road, gibbering of old violence, brushing his neck with their fingers. He made himself walk because he knew all about running, and just like in the old times if he ever once began to run—
Then, just like in the old times, he was running—running anyhow, in spite or reason and pride, and it seemed slow and hopeless, like running in a dream, like in the old times with the Federals hooting and cheering behind him and the balls humming around his ears and the little drawn-up place in the center of his back where the ball or the bayonet would go in if he didn’t run fast enough—running in the impossible mud, awkward with the carpet bag in his hand and the canteen banging and his hat wanting to fly off, and trying not to trip over the dog who was running too. He ran a quarter of a mile before he stopped at last, just where the road began to curve. He was sweating and gasping for breath in the hot, still air, and he felt every inch the fool.
“I’ll tell you,” he said to the dog, who was panting in the grass, “It would kill a man to have to come home too often.”
III
Gawain had not seen Morgan Rhea since the morning three years before when he had boarded the cars to Corinth, so the image he had been carrying in his head was exactly that of the ambrotype she had given him. In the picture, she sat erect on a spindly chair, her dark hair pulled back from a face that was composed and thoughtful, her thin fingers clasped in her lap. While he was soldiering, Gawain had looked at that image so many times that he had difficulty seeing her in any other way, though he knew that somewhere in his memory she was moving, laughing, reclining, hopping with excitement, pointing, draping her hand over the back of a chair. Yet he could not reach these things, wherever they were; he saw her only as a slender, thoughtful woman seated before a ridiculous painted backdrop of what might have been willows, her hands forever joined in the lap of her voluminous dress.
Once, back in the winter on the Nashville campaign, he had found himself alone on picket. They were in Decatur, Alabama, waiting to see if the yankees would come out and fight so they could whip them and cross the river there. Gawain sat with his back against the frame of a deserted house, its weatherboards stripped for fires. The muddy yard, littered with stumps, was dismal in the pale twilight, and the air smelled of wood smoke, and somewhere a mule was braying, and the loom of the Federal earthworks was just visible at the end of the street. He was cold and would only get colder as night came. His nose was running, he had not eaten that day (though he was not hungry; he had long since quit being hungry) nor had he bathed in recent memory; his shoes were so thin he could identify leaves merely by stepping on them, and his breeches were stiff with mud, and he had fleas, and any moment the mean western yankees might sortie from their works and gobble him up. In that state he found himself yearning for Morgan Rhea in a way he had not done in months. The feeling came all of a sudden, rolling like a black fog over his heart, darkening the sky’s last orange ribbon and deepening the cold beyond night. For a moment, he believed he could not bear it. He shut his eyes, and for another moment believed he could will himself across time and space, away from this wretched village and over the long hills and ridges westward toward the sun where she was. But when he looked again, he saw only the barren end of day, and beyond that tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.
He scrambled to his knees then, fumbled at the buckle of his haversack, and drew thence the gutta-percha case that Morgan had pressed into his hand the day he left Cumberland. He opened it, and noticed for the first time that the image was cracked—a thin line down her face and between her breasts, from top to bottom of the plate. He could not say when he’d done it or how it could have happened, but there it was. He sat down again, cradling the picture in his hands, thinking Of course it is broken, of course it is—just like the letters he had lost. He had all her letters once, tied up with a piece of ribbon he’d found in an empty house, and in them he could hear her voice whenever he wanted—and he had lost them. One day they were gone, and with them her voice, and now her image was broken, and Gawain, in the last bitter fade of twilight, discovered he could no longer see her at all.
He would still look at the ambrotype every single day as the bloody winter passed into the last bloody spring of the war. But in that yard in Decatur, he put away once and for all the notion that he could see her, make her move, hear her voice—put away the idea that she was anything but a dream, something he had made up, patched together out of the sorry shambles of desire. She became an abstract like the dead used to be; a principle he had believed in once and didn’t anymore, but that he still clung to anyhow, like honor, and love of country, and the regimental colors that tilted toward the dark.
The winter and spring brought terrible battles, defeat, the long retreat, surrender. But no more letters came, no voice out of the empty place that lay beyond the present moment. So he found it even easier to believe she was really a dream, or dead, or lost to him some other way, no matter. He was able to cling to that with a kind of satisfaction, growing used to the silence, ready for the time when he would be dead himself, and never sure that the moment had not come already.
Now suddenly he was free. He was alive after all, and unaccountably moving down the road that would take him home. So he pulled himself away from memory and saw the green woods again, and the gnats swirling in the shafts of sun, and heard again the towhee somewhere, and with him now a mourning dove, then another answering.
He stopped. There was the dog, gazing up into the branches of a sweet-gum where he had treed an old red squirrel fat on the spring bounty. The squirrel began to bark, and the dog watched him with interest.
He would have to believe again: that she was real, that somewhere up ahead she was moving through that very morning. He recalled what his cousin Rena had said, as if he were hearing it for the first time: She spoke of you. So Morgan Rhea did have a voice, even if he could not hear it, and she must remember.
But remember what? The Gawain Harper who had boarded the cars for Corinth with a valise and an umbrella? He had left her no image of himself save what she carried in her memory, so what did she see when she thought of him, if she thought of him at all?
“Hah!” he said, and laughed. He had come a long way from whatever it was she saw in her head; that much was plain at least. He would go and find out how far.
“Come along, dog,” he said. “We goin to town.”
The fyce did not want to leave the squirrel, but Gawain made him, and together they moved down the road. Gawain went quietly by old habit, watching, though he didn’t have to now. Went quietly, he and the dog, so when they came around a bend, they spooked a horse standing there, a scrawny black gelding that, to look at him, shouldn’t have had the energy to buck like he did and run off at the gallop, stirrups flapping, leaving his rider sitting in the mud. The dog took off after the horse, and Gawain looked at the rider. “Good God,” he said.
“Good God yourself,” said the man. “What you mean, ambushin me like that?” He began to pick himself up from the mud, and Gawain moved to help him.
“I wasn’t ambushin,” Gawain said, taking the man’s arm.
“You ain’t a robber, are you?” said the man. “For if you are, you have done run off the only thing I have worth stealin, and he ain’t much, the son of a bitch. Throwin me in the road—the very idea. And after all we been through. I tell you, if I live a century I’ll never figure out horses—they are crazy, ever on
e of em, through and through. I hope you ain’t a robber—I have had my fill of—”
“Jesus and Mary,” said Gawain. “Do I look like a robber to you?”
The man regarded Gawain with narrowed eyes. He was as tall as Gawain and as skinny, about the same age and with the same sunken face and bristly chin, but with long, greasy brownish-red hair that hung down over his collar. He wore a porkpie hat, still in place, and a dark butternut officer’s frock coat, and checkered breeches tucked into his boots, and spurs, and a waistcoat with a thick watch chain, and a striped gingham shirt, and a cravat. The collar of the coat had a darker patch where the rank had been removed, but the right cuff bore an embroidered square-and-compasses, once gold but rusty now. He was all over mud, not just from the fall but from journeying too. “No,” he said at last. “No, if you are a robber, you have not been a success at it.” He put out his hand. “I am Harry Stribling,” he said.
The two men clasped hands in the road. “Have you traveled long?” Stribling asked.
“Oh, a long time,” said Gawain. “I am comin up from south Alabama, but my home is yonder, a mile or two, in Cumberland. And you?”
“Oh, a long ways. Truth to tell, though, I don’t know where I’m goin. Just goin.”
“Where is your home?” asked Gawain.
Stribling looked up the road. “Somewheres,” he said. “Up yonder.” Then he grinned. “Who knows?”
“Well,” said Gawain, and let it drop. “You can come with me if you want. I am weary of solitude.”
“Just so,” said Stribling.
“I am sorry about your horse,” said Gawain. “I will help you catch him, if that infernal dog ain’t run him to Michigan.”
“Oh, he won’t need any catchin,” said Stribling. “He is about used up and only did that because he’s in a bad humor. We’ll come upon him directly. Say, is that your bag in the road?”
Gawain nodded and picked up the carpet bag. They began to walk, Stribling limping a little. “You hurt your leg in the fall,” said Gawain.
“No,” said Stribling. “I got shot once, is all. It’s nothin.”
“Ain’t it hard to walk?” asked Gawain.
“No, I prefer to walk. Fact of the matter is, when I get wherever it is I’m goin, I intend to do nothin but walk for the rest of my natural life. I am through with horses forevermore.”
“You were a cavalryman. I have often heard them say such things.”
“Indeed.”
“I was in the infantry,” said Gawain, “and I have walked all I care to.”
“How will you get around then?”
“I intend to stroll,” said Gawain. “Everywhere.”
“Of course,” said Stribling.
They talked awhile, telling their regiments and campaigns, finding places where the complicated arcs of their lives had crossed. Stribling had been with Chalmers and had operated in this very country, on this very road in fact, and had been in many of the fights Gawain had, and some that Gawain never heard of: Brice’s Crossroads, for instance, and Harrisburg. For his part, Gawain could claim the Atlanta campaign, which Stribling had missed. Then Stribling told how he’d been a captain once, but when he was paroled, the Federal officer made him remove the rank and buttons from his coat. Gawain said they let him keep his buttons, and he hadn’t any rank anyhow, so that was all right.
“Where is your coat, then?” asked Stribling.
“I got shut of it,” said Gawain. “Give it to a nigger when I bought this one.”
Stribling laughed. He started to speak, then shook his head and laughed again.
“What?” asked Gawain.
“Just funny to think about,” said Stribling. “About everything that’s happened, and that’s all it has come to.”
“Yes,” said Gawain. “Ain’t it funny.”
They walked in silence for a time, thinking about everything that had happened and what it had all come to. Then Stribling spoke again.
“What’s your line? I mean, when you are home. Was home, I mean.”
“Ah,” said Gawain, and now he laughed. “I am—was—a professor of literature at the Cumberland Female Academy—which, I understand, is no more. And you?”
“Oh, I used to practice the law, had a newspaper for a while over in Alabama when the war came. At present I am … a philosopher.”
“I would not think there’d be much call for that these days,” said Gawain.
“Nor a professor either,” said Stribling.
“Indeed,” said Gawain Harper.
They talked along, and in a half mile or so they came to the horse cropping weeds by the roadside, the dog lying at his feet.
“Told you,” said Stribling.
The horse rolled his eyes as Stribling approached, and sidestepped until Stribling took up the trailing reins. “You sorry, vile, ungrateful son of a bitch,” said Stribling as he stroked the horse’s bony nose. The animal wore a McClellan saddle and an army headstall with “U.S.” rosettes. Behind the cantle were a blanket roll and a pair of saddlebags. “He is called Xenophon,” said Stribling.
“That seems a good deal of a name for such a horse,” said Gawain.
“Why I call him Zeke,” said Stribling. “Come along, Zeke.” He began to walk, holding the reins, and the horse came along behind, and the dog rose and followed the horse, and Gawain followed them all up the southerly road.
PILGRIMS THEY WERE, and for a little while longer they could shape whatever possibilities they wished about the moment toward which they journeyed. The road led to places they had known once, that they believed they knew still. If they could only get there, they would not be strangers—the illusion would fold in on itself, collapse into the vacuum of the lost years and prove itself only an illusion after all. But the road, for all its relics, told them little, really; it was only a suspension, its lights and shadows hovering at the margin of time, and for this little while they moved like figures in a dream. At their backs lay the old world they had known, remote now as the valleys of the moon, to which they could never return no matter how much the old people spoke of it. Perhaps they wouldn’t even if they could, for they had seen that old world doomed by its own essence; it had thrust them into the dark adventure, had been consumed and left them with little but the taste of ashes for their trials. And now the dark adventure was itself finished, more or less; quieter at least, no longer so immediate, though they would never be done with it altogether. Nor understand it either, for if their purpose was clear to them once, too much had happened for it ever to be clear again. Yet they would come to understand this much, long hence: that the adventure was a destination of its own, perhaps the only one they’d been born to, and wherever they traveled afterward would be less search than wandering.
But that was in time to come. Right now, Gawain Harper and Harry Stribling had no real sense of their own history, no more than the high geese traveling across the stars. They were too busy: they were spared of death, so must once again pay the tally for living; free, so they were indentured to tomorrow. It was the same tomorrow Gawain had seen long ago in the winter twilight, only now it was not so simple. Now it was a tangle of possibilities at which they could only wonder, like children in a magic wood. And wondering, they would have to yearn once more.
Gawain Harper could not speak for his companion, but for him the yearning grew more intolerable at every step. Getting closer made it so, he supposed, but that understanding gave no comfort. The feeling had withdrawn into a region below his heart and lay there like a coiled worm, gnawing at him, Harry Stribling was telling a story about the last time he and Zeke had been on this road; Gawain tried to listen, and at the same time wished he had a bayonet to prod the whole entourage along toward Cumberland. Then, suddenly, Gawain decided he could not go on at all. “Hold on,” he said.
“What?” said Stribling.
Gawain moved to the roadside and sat down in the weeds.
“You gone get red bugs, doin that,” said Stribling.
“What’s the matter, boy?” said Stribling. “You sick?”
Gawain nodded.
“Well,” said Stribling, “likely you got the dysentery.”
“No,” said Gawain. “No, it ain’t the dysentery.”
Stribling plucked a weed, put the stalk in his teeth. He looked up the road. Presently, he said, “You ever in all that time come home on a furlough?”
Gawain shook his head.
“Me neither,” said Stribling.
“Look here,” said Gawain. “I will show you somethin.” He opened his bag, rooted around inside, came out with the gutta-percha case. He handed it to Stribling, who took it without question, opened it, looked for a long moment. “My, my, my,” he said at last, in a tone that suggested approval, envy, even a hint that, given the chance, Stribling would steal this prize for himself: the immemorial response of a soldier presented with any image, letter, token of another’s sweetheart, wife, sister, daughter—no matter how appalling.
“Her name is Morgan,” said Gawain. “I have not laid eyes on her in three years.”
Stribling closed the case, touched it reverently and gave it back. “So now you are afraid,” he said.
Gawain shrugged. “I don’t know what I am.”
Stribling stood, his knees popping. “Ah, me,” he said. “You ever ride a horse before?”
“Only when pressed,” said Gawain.
“Well, what you need is to get up on old Zeke, and I’ll whack him on the behind, and you’ll be home just directly—then you’ll see there ain’t nothin to be afraid of.”