The Year of Jubilo

by Bahr, Howard;

  He would not do such a thing, of course, but the impulse was strong enough to propel Colonel Burduck toward the road where the returning soldier had moved on. Overhead a crow muttered in the trees—Burduck knew a crow anyway, though he hadn’t much use for them—and the small birds sang, and some of the night voices still lingered in the grass. When he came to the road, he hesitated. He did not wish to appear the fool, and he really did not care to frighten the man, but after a moment he left the brush and stepped out into the mud of the road. The wayfarer was a hundred yards away now, walking briskly, the dog trotting along beside. Then, as Burduck watched, the man began to run.

  AFTERNOON, AND THE rain was coming again as it had every afternoon for a week now. The bright sun of morning was diminished to a pearly light, and people in Cumberland looked to the western sky where the darkness gathered. They watched the lightning flicker, heard the sullen mutter of thunder beyond the western ridges, and not a few of them remembered artillery, whether they wanted to or not.

  Two soldiers stood on the portico of the Shipwright house, just south of the square. The older one, Sergeant Raphael Deaton, was sergeant of the guard today. He smoked a cunning clay pipe carved in the likeness of a buxom Indian maiden. The younger man, Tom Kelly, worked an enormous wad of plug tobacco in his cheek. Both men wore the dark frock coats and sky-blue trousers of the Regular infantry, and forage caps still adorned with the acorn badge of the old Fourteenth Corps with whom they had served throughout the late war. Both leaned on their long Springfield muskets in the casual way of veterans.

  “See here, young Kelly,” said Rafe Deaton. “Since when did you take up chawin anyhow?”

  Kelly spat a long, careful stream of ambure toward the porch steps. “Oh, days and days ago,” he said, wiping his mouth on his coat sleeve. “I am cultivatin my vices in hopes I might be a sergeant one day.”

  “Commendable,” said Rafe. “Does Darlin Annie know about it?” The reference was to Kelly’s wife in Kentucky, upon whom he lavished a touching and, in Rafe Deaton’s view, unaccountable devotion.

  “Lord perish the thought,” said Kelly. His face softened. “Reckon what she is doin now?”

  Rafe snorted. He had heard the same question a thousand times.

  “It ain’t funny,” Kelly said.

  “You’re right,” said Rafe. Then he asked, as he always did, “Well, what do you think she’s doin now?”

  Kelly thought a moment. “Well, I expect she’s makin dinner about now,” he said. “I can see her same as if I was there. She is rollin out biscuits, and there is … a ham. And some collards. It’s hot as everything in the kitchen.”

  “My, my,” said Rafe. The vision reminded him that he had not eaten since early morning, and now it was afternoon. He found himself thinking of a girl he had never seen, her hands white with flour, in a kitchen full of sunlight. He shook the image away. “I tried chawin once,” he said. “Made me sick as a dog.”

  Kelly spat again. “It does me, too, if the truth be known,” he said.

  “Well,” said Rafe, “you will have to get shut of that chaw now, and look to your post. You might try standin at attention.”

  Kelly fished the wad out of his jaw and flung it off the porch. He straightened, and brought his musket to support arms. Even with the bayonet fixed, there was plenty of room under the tall portico. “Whére is the good Colonel this day?” he asked.

  “I’m sure I don’t know,” said Rafe. “The Colonel don’t inform me of his whereabouts. Perhaps you would like to quiz Captain Bloom on the subject?”

  The reference to their company commander made Kelly shudder. “Lord perish the thought,” he said.

  “I thought not,” said Rafe, and turned away.

  The other shifted uncomfortably. “Sometimes I wonder if he is well, Rafe. The Colonel, I mean.”

  The sergeant was about to go down the steps. Now he stopped, turned again. “Be careful what you say, young Kelly.”

  “Oh, well,” said the other. “I don’t mean nothing. Only—”

  Rafe crossed the porch again. He reached out, his musket in the crook of his arm, and straightened Kelly’s coat under his cartridge-box belt, and closed an errant button. “Only, what?” he asked. “You think the Colonel’s about to lose his judgment again?”

  Kelly shrugged. “I seen it happen once.”

  “So you did,” said Rafe. “So did we all. Now, be a good lad and don’t fret yourself about it. Look to your post.”

  “All right,” said Kelly. “Say, if it rains, will you bring my poncho?”

  “Oh, surely,” said Rafe. “I would not have you die of consumption and leave Miss Annie to the clutches of a scoundrel like myself.”

  “What do you mean by that?” asked Tom Kelly.

  “Oh, nothin, lad,” said the sergeant, and laughed. He crossed the porch, went down the stairs, and picked his way across the mud of the yard to the road. He, too, would have liked to know where Colonel Burduck was. The battalion was still spread up and down the railroad, and no doubt the Colonel was off to see about things. On the other hand— But never mind, he thought quickly. And anyway, wherever the Colonel was, there was nothing that he, Sergeant Rafe Deaton, could do about it.

  From the edge of the road, Rafe could look under the arch of the trees toward the ruin of the square and the little knoll where the courthouse had been once. Rafe thought he knew what it had looked like; he had fleshed out the building by talking to men who remembered it. He could imagine it now—the warm bricks, the tall windows thrown open, the classical portico gleaming white at the end of the tunnel of trees. Nothing remained but the columns, blackened by the fire that consumed the square ten months ago, and behind them a pile of bricks and ashes. Around the knoll lay a moat of deep black mud, churned by horses and the wheels of heavy wagons. Ringing the moat were more ashes, more piles of brick, isolated chimneys, charred timbers reaching skyward like the limbs of the dead. Here and there the dingy flanks of a wall tent, or a flimsy, windowless, clapboard hut, rose sullenly from a cleared space. One of these last, a quarter mile back down the southerly road, was painted peacock blue and sported a narrow gallery furnished with overturned kegs to accommodate the clientele. Hanging from the gallery roof was a sign:

  THE CITADEL OF DJIBOUTI

  L. W. Thomas, Prop.

  Rafe knew that Frye’s Tavern once stood on this site—an old inn from the post-road days, ancient, sagging, comfortable, of two stories with a pair of rock chimneys and a mossy shingle roof, where local companies had been raised for the Confederate army in that first glorious spring. Now old Frye was dead, and his tavern burned and gone, and the site would be empty still were it not for L. W. Thomas, a Union man.

  Thomas arrived in Cumberland during the cold, empty days of January on a government train from Grand Junction. Among the articles in his valise were a roll of Federal banknotes; the deed to the old Frye place, duly signed and witnessed by the executor of the Frye estate—another Union man—who had fled to Memphis when the yankees secured it in ’62; and a sutler’s commission signed by General Washburn himself. Without delay, and in spite of the winter weather, Thomas hired a crew, cleared the rubble of the old tavern away, and built the Citadel of newly planed lumber from the sawmill beyond Leaf River. He contracted with Mister Audley Brummett to haul his wares from the steamboat landing at Wyatt’s when the roads dried out. Finally he discovered, in the attic of an abandoned house, seventeen pots of the peacock-blue paint which would transform this shanty, with its canted stovepipe and smell of raw lumber, to a curio set down among the elms and cedars like a bright bird strayed from some unimaginable clime.

  Rafe Deaton wished he was at the Citadel now, in this close afternoon with the rain coming. Queenolia Divine, who cooked for Mister Thomas, offered stew, turnip greens from her early garden, fresh perch caught out of Leaf River, ham sometimes, and gumbo, served with great flagons of beer on a raw trestleboard in the blue-painted, dimly lit interior: a cornucopia like no one—soldier
s or civilians—had seen in years. But Rafe was not at the Citadel, nor was he likely to be this day.

  Rafe Deaton watched up the road and felt the hours close around him. Long years ago, when he was a boy in Mulberry, Tennessee, he would journey to a certain high ridge on summer days and spend a solitary hour looking down on the broad earth below. In the rank, sweet grass at his feet, he could hear the drowsy voices of insects. But beyond, where the green fields and woods fell away to the haze of the world’s end, there was only a great stillness, where hawks and buzzards floated on silent pinions, and the air was hushed in timeless, unassailable peace. He used to believe that a portent lay in that noon’s quiet suspension—that if he could just look hard enough, or listen long enough, he might perceive his own fate in the voiceless reaches of the air. All that was a long time ago, and he believed in portents no longer, but as he looked down the road toward Cumberland, he felt that something lay huddled in the hour’s stillness, some answer perhaps to a question he had not yet thought to ask. He smiled. There was too much mystery to peace, he thought, and too much complication. War was a good deal simpler. He knocked out his pipe and was about to turn back to the house when a soldier came into the yard, a corporal whom Rafe had known since the old days at Jefferson Barracks. The man was off-duty and wore his frock coat open save for the button at the collar. A stream of blood trickled from his nose, and as Rafe watched, he wiped at it and smeared it on his cheek. He approached shaking his head, as if he had seen something too absurd to be believed.

  “Rafe,” he said, “you ought to come quick. They’s trouble at the Citadel.”

  AS RAFE DEATON was trotting down to the Citadel of Djibouti to investigate the disturbance, Colonel Michael Burduck was sitting his horse in the southerly road, trying to remember how he had come to be there. His watch told him it was one o’clock; the hour was gray, and thunder was muttering to the west. When last he consulted the time, on the overturned pot at the Wagner place, it was nine o’clock and the sun shining. Four hours gone then, and no accounting for them. The Colonel checked himself. His uniform was buttoned, he wore his saber and sash, his hat was in place, the lap desk was properly stowed in a saddlebag, his pistol was unfired. He was intact.

  “What happened, Sally?” he asked his black mare, but the horse only rolled her eyes at him and pulled at the bit. The thunder was close now, and she was nervous. “All right,” said Burduck, and pushed the mare up the southerly road. Just beyond Leaf River bridge, it began to rain.

  THEY WERE ALMOST to town when Gawain stopped again. He drew up in the middle of the road and dropped his bag. “Dammit,” he said.

  “What’s the matter now?” asked Stribling. He was mounted, his left leg cocked up, reins tied over the pommel of the saddle. His hat was off and balanced on the top of Zeke’s head.

  “Maybe I just won’t go on atall,” said Gawain. “Maybe I’ll turn around, go back south. I liked it down around Mobile. You ever been there, Harry?”

  “No, but I been to New Orleans,” Stribling said. “If we are goin back south, we ought to go to New Orleans. But we are not goin south, we are goin to Cumberland.” He looked at the sky. “And anyhow, it’s fixin to rain—we got to go.”

  “Maybe I won’t go,” said Gawain.

  “Well, good God,” said Stribling. “It’s not but a quarter mile.” He removed his hat from between the horse’s ears and jammed it back on his head.

  They had come to the place where Mister John Walker’s house once stood, just south of the Cumberland square. The road climbed a little rise just here, before dipping down to the square. Not many trees grew this close to town, the old timber having long been cut for sawmill or stove or hearth, or more recently for soldiers’ fires. The trees that remained were lofty and grand, musing like old gentlemen along the road, left clustered here and there for shade over cabins and feed lots and in the yards of houses. Walker, a bachelor, had been of Gawain’s regiment, been hurt bad and captured at Franklin, or perhaps Nashville, Gawain wasn’t certain. He was certain that this was the place where the house had been, but no house was here now: only a grove of oaks, a pair of chimneys, and between these a jumble of ashes and timbers, and in the middle of it all the charred remains of an upright piano. “I knew that fellow,” said Gawain, nodding toward the house. “I guess he ain’t home.”

  “No,” said Stribling, “he don’t appear to be. Now, what is all this? Have you forgot that Miss … blame it, what’s her name, anyhow?”

  “You mean Morgan?” said Gawain.

  “Have you forgot that Miss Morgan is pining away, not a quarter mile up this road?”

  “Morgan Rhea,” said Gawain.

  “That’s her,” said Stribling. “Now, what’s the matter with you?”

  Gawain shook his head. “Back yonder on the road, before I run into you, I got the feelin—ah, Jesus, Harry, you were right. We are all strangers here. This ain’t a place I remember. Look at it! Look at John Walker’s house, at that piano there! And everything all hacked down and trampled, and over the rise yonder—what? Maybe I don’t want to see that.”

  Stribling shifted in the saddle, the leather creaking. “I wish you wouldn’t think so much,” he said.

  “It’s all I been doin, Harry. I—” He stopped, his eyes narrowed, looking down the road. “Now, what the hell is that, pray tell?”

  Stribling followed Gawain’s pointing finger, and looked, and after a moment said, “Well, damned if I know, but ain’t it gay?”

  “That’s where Mister Frye’s old post-tavern used to be—see? The chinaberries and the big elm still stand.”

  “What do you suppose it is now?” asked Stribling.

  “I don’t know, but it certainly is blue, ain’t it?”

  The two men marveled at the ramshackle building by the roadside; windowless it was, with a slanted woodshed roof and a flimsy gallery and a canted stovepipe—but nothing in all that land partook of color in the way that shanty did. Against the leaves, gone gray now in the light of afternoon, it shimmered dreamlike, seemed carved from some great gem or raised from the iridescent feathers of birds. Gawain and Stribling blinked at it. Their eyes were accustomed to grays and browns and comfortable woodland greens; this unexpected burst of color astonished and delighted them, as if the sun itself had broken peacock blue through the clouds.

  Then, as they watched, the blue began to spill out into the yard—a riot of light blue and dark blue, of faces and’ hands and the voices of men. For a moment, Gawain could not comprehend—then it struck him, hard. He felt the old cold turning in his stomach. The sweat came out on his forehead, and the blood drummed in his ears, and for an instant he could not breathe—weeks and months and all the long road fell away, and he was falling with them, back and back, and felt again the mad glee of chaos waiting just beyond the next step—a little run, the line bending into a V behind the slanted colors, smoke and fire and the old cry rising in their throats.

  “Ah!” he cried, and shook his head, willing himself back to the road, the summer day, the prosaic carpet bag at his feet.

  “Yes, goddamn,” said Stribling. “See the yankee sons of bitches!” His voice was strained, he had straightened in the saddle, was leaned forward with the reins in his hands. Then, as Gawain watched, he relaxed. He looked down, grinning. “Good God,” he said, and laughed.

  Gawain laughed in return. “What’s the matter, boy?” he said. “Yankees make you nervous?”

  “Hah,” said Stribling. He looked back up the road. “That’s a right smart of em, and they’re mad with somebody. Look—some of em are armed.”

  “No doubt somebody called out the guard,” said Gawain. “Look, there’s a brave sergeant.”

  “Coming at the trot,” said Stribling. “Now—hey, see that big fellow in his shirtsleeves? And the lanky one—there, in the sack coat!”

  “Why, they have taken on the whole lot,” said Gawain. “Whoa! There the big one’s laid a fellow out in the road!”

  “Well struck!”
cried Stribling, standing up in his stirrups. “See that one with the crutch? My, how he does lay about with it—see it? Damn, Harper, we must ride to the rescue!”

  “Rescue, hell,” said Gawain. “Let the bluebellies save they own selves!”

  “Indeed, sir,” said Stribling, “but nevertheless—” and jammed his spurs into Zeke’s flanks. The horse squealed and shot forward, hooves throwing gobbets of mud. Gawain scrambled to his feet, watched Zeke slip and slide and find his footing and gallop away, Stribling lashing the horse’s rump with his hat, hollering. Gawain waved his arms and cried out, all to no avail. Harry Stribling was making the last cavalry charge of the war, and all Gawain could do was take up his carpet bag and follow, running clumsily in the mud for the second time that day.

  The mud caught and tugged and pulled at him, and now a wind came up, pushed ahead of the storm, and the leaves showed their undersides, and the trees began to thrash and sigh. The gray sky lit up with lightning, a quick white flash like the burst of a shell, and Gawain ducked in spite of himself, and when the sharp report of the thunder rolled over him, he gritted his teeth and ran on. It is only lightnin, he thought, and then remembered he was afraid of lightning too. Then the first fat drops of the summer rain fell, coming straight down like stones, then the rain in earnest, a solid sheet of it—the world was suddenly white with rain, and Gawain stopped in the road, the water pouring off the brim of his good straw hat.

  He stood in the road, blind and soaking wet, and listened to the rain hammer around him. He could no longer hear the voices of the lads up ahead, nor the sound of Zeke and Harry Stribling passing up the road, nor anything at all but the cracking thunder and the good pounding of the rain. He turned his face to the sky, let the rain strike him, felt it run down his collar—and all at once he was overcome with the desire to make water himself. He stood in the middle of the southerly road and fumbled open the buttons of his trousers and began to relieve himself. In the thrashing of the storm, he did not hear the rider’s approach.