The Year of Jubilo

by Bahr, Howard;

  “Speak up,” said Aunt Vassar from the doorway.

  “Papa!” said Gawain, louder now. “How you doin?”

  Old Harper started, looked around him. “What?” he snapped.

  “I said How you doin!” bellowed Gawain into the hairy cup of his father’s ear.

  “Yes, yes,” croaked the old man irritably. “I done told em that already, the sons of bitches.”

  “Good God,” said Gawain.

  The room smelled of camphor. Gawain looked around at the familiar furniture, heavy and dark: the wardrobe, the chairs, the dresser, the bookshelves crowded with ancient tomes, the sagging bed, the rug worn threadbare. The hearth spilled cold ashes across the floor, and the clock on the mantel tick-tocked as it always had. But the clock lied, Gawain thought. There was no time here, not by the clock, not by day or night or season. His eyes darted to the chair by the hearth; it was empty, or so it seemed.

  “Good God,” he said again, and backed away from his father’s chair. Then Aunt Vassar was beside him. “Listen to me, Gawain—it is your life you have come back to, not mine nor his nor anybody else’s. Yours. Can you understand that?”

  He did not answer. The sun was dropping lower now, and the light in the room was strong and burnished, moving with the shadows of the hack-berry leaves. A squirrel sat in the crook of a limb, turning an acorn in his paws. The old man blinked at the sun, muttered and sneezed and rubbed his eyes. He spoke a name Gawain could not understand. Gawain turned away then. He looked at his hands; they were shaking. “Oh,” he said, “I got to eat somethin.”

  Aunt Vassar took Gawain by the arm. “I know, boy,” she said.

  “I really got to eat somethin,” Gawain said again. “My hands get shaky when I don’t eat. See?”

  He held up his hands for her to see. “I know they do,” she said. “I know.”

  THERE IS A moment when the day’s axis turns, when time begins to slide away toward night again. The exact moment is imperceptible, though if a watcher is careful, he might perceive the signs. He might see how light and air conspire to make a stillness, to soften the sharp edges of the world. He might note how sounds no longer ring so brightly, and how shadows creep into places still warm from the sun. Shadows, the first sure tendrils of night, reach into fence corners and woods and up the eastern face of houses, and with the shadows come the birds again, hurrying against the night, and timid feeders move quivering over the grass, who know the hawks have folded themselves away, and the owls not yet awakened.

  In his early life, Harry Stribling made a conscious effort to mark himself in time. Among other experiments, he tried endlessly, in every season, to close his hand around the exact moment when day gave way to evening. But at length he decided it was impossible and gave it up, as he gave up trying to touch the moment when sleep arrived. Now he contented himself with knowing only that the turning had come. He was thinking about that when he saw her. She was moving down the shadows, under the trees that lined the townward road. “Ah,” he said.

  Nobles and Peck and Stribling still sat in the doorway. “Well,” said Peck. “There comes Old Hundred-and-Eleven again, and he’s got … my, who is that?”

  The woman was slender and tall, in a pale blue dress that she held up out of the mud. From this distance, they could not see the details of her face, only that her skin was pale and her dark hair pulled back in a bun. They did not have to see her face to know that she was agitated; her whole body communicated that news. Old Hundred-and-Eleven was lumbering along behind her with his hat in his hand. They watched the two of them approach the sentry, who stood stiffly at attention for a moment or two while the woman talked at him. When the sentry pointed toward the boxcar door, the woman turned her face that way and scowled.

  “Why, that is Morgan Rhea,” said Peck. “What is she doing here, do you suppose?”

  “I always thought she was handsome,” said Nobles.

  “I, too,” said Peck. He leaned back on his elbows and laughed. “I danced with her once, at a barbecue on the Fourth of July.” He laughed again and thumped the stump of his leg against the boxcar floor. “The thief, Time,” he said.

  Stribling pushed himself away from the boxcar and landed on his feet in the mud. The knee of his bad leg buckled, and he almost fell.

  “Where you goin?” said Nobles.

  “I have an engagement with Miss Rhea,” said Stribling.

  “You?” said Peck. “She don’t even know you.”

  “I reckon she’s fixin to,” said Stribling. He moved away from the boxcar, at the same time raising his hand to the woman. “Hey!” said the sentry, but Stribling ignored him. He watched Morgan Rhea move across the muddy space between them.

  “This is the feller!” said Old Hundred-and-Eleven when they were a dozen paces away. They came up to Stribling then, the old man breathing hard, Morgan gritting her teeth. Now that he could see her face, Stribling allowed she was handsome indeed, even with the smallpox scars that pitted her cheeks. He liked her hands, too; they were long and slender, and the finger she raised in his face was steady.

  “Who are you?” she demanded.

  “This here’s the feller sent me to fetch you,” said Old Hundred-and-Eleven. “He said you could save me from the rope—didn’t you, Cap’n?”

  “I suppose I did,” said Stribling. He took off his hat and made a slight bow. “I am Harry Stribling, and I am—”

  “A liar, I should say!” spat Morgan. “What is all this business about hangin? Why, I have known this man since I was a baby, and he has never done—”

  Stribling held up his hand. “Please,” he said, without prelude. “I bring you word of Gawain Harper.”

  Stribling regretted his haste at once. The woman recoiled as if he had slapped her. She tried to speak, but no sound came, and when she staggered, Stribling put out his hand and caught her. She shook him away. “Dead!” she said at last. “I knew it, all this time!”

  “Now, hold on,” Stribling began, but she shrank away from him.

  “Oh, I have been waitin for you,” she said. “I didn’t know who you’d be or what you’d look like, but I knew you’d come. I watched for you, I—”

  “Oh, Lord,” said Old Hundred-and-Eleven. “Oh, Lord, what’s the matter!”

  She turned, put her hand against the old man’s chest, pushed him gently, her voice forced into gentleness. “Go along. Nobody’s goin to hang you, it was all a great joke and now it’s over. Go along.”

  The old man scratched his head, put his hat back on, took it off again. “Well,” he said.

  “Go on, now,” she said, and Old Hundred-and-Eleven nodded and turned back toward the boxcar. Stribling was about to speak when she whirled on him. “Don’t tell me anything about it,” she said. “Nothin, you hear? I don’t want to know how or where, or how gallant it was, or what his last words were.” She raised her hands, palms outward, and began to back away. “How dare you bring me here for this. If I were a man, I’d kill you. I might do it anyhow.”

  Jesus Christ, thought Stribling. He was aware that the boys were watching the scene; the sentry had joined them at the boxcar, and they were all waiting to see what would happen next. Stribling cleared his throat. “Now, see here,” he said. “I did not say that he was dead, did not mean to imply that he was dead—fact is, he ain’t dead atall, and you must quit this foolishness so I can talk to you.”

  The woman lowered her hands, looked at Stribling with eyes narrowed in anger. “Foolishness, is it?” she hissed. “First you scare that old man nearly to death, then bring me here on a lie, and now you speak a name I had already put away and didn’t want to take out again. What do you mean he isn’t dead? What do you want? Who are you?”

  Stribling, who had envisioned a rational conversation once his deception was revealed, found himself irritated. “Good God,” he said. “Will you settle down? I just want to talk to you about the boy. I have good tidings, if you will get off the ramparts for a minute. Good God.”

  She d
rew herself up and brushed at a loose strand of hair. “What happened to your eye?” she asked.

  The irrelevancy of the question startled Stribling. He unconsciously touched his eye and winced. “I was in a fight, which landed me in the jail yonder, which is why I couldn’t seek you out myself.”

  “What kind of fight was it?” asked the girl.

  “Recreational,” said Stribling. “Now, Miss Morgan—”

  “How do you know my name, sir?”

  Stribling was growing weary of her questions. “Since I met Gawain Harper this mornin, I have only heard it a hundred times.” She blushed at this, and Stribling felt a twinge of satisfaction. Then he looked back at the boxcar again where the boys were watching. Nobles waved at him and smiled. “Can we walk up the road a bit?” asked Stribling. “I am harmless—Mister Marcus Peck and the rest of those fellows will vouch for me.”

  “That is hardly a recommendation,” said Morgan Rhea. “However, I will walk with you. How is it you can stroll about when you are supposed to be in jail?”

  “We like to think of ourselves as prisoners at large,” said Stribling.

  They went up the road, and as they walked Stribling told her of the morning’s adventures—excepting the incident with Molochi Fish—and by the time they reached the edge of the square, she was smiling. Mercurial, thought Stribling, nodding sagely to himself. Very mercurial.

  “You told poor Old Hundred-and-Eleven that yarn just so he would fetch me, so you could tell me this?”

  “I figured you wouldn’t come otherwise,” Stribling pointed out again.

  “Quite right,” she said. “But now you may explain to me why Gawain himself isn’t standing here tellin me all this?” Her voice caught in her throat then, and for an instant Stribling thought she might cry. But she didn’t, and Stribling wondered why. Instead, she looked back down the road, squinting into the evening sun. “Did he send you to tell me this? Was it his doing?”

  “No,” said Stribling, and was glad he could say it, for it seemed a relief to her.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “When you first said his name, I thought he was … dead—” She interrupted herself. “Why did I do that? Why did I assume—”

  “There has been a great deal of bein dead,” said Stribling. “Perhaps we have grown to expect it.”

  “Perhaps.” She shaded her eyes with her hand. Stribling thought the light on her face was pretty. “When you told me that, it came to me all at once how the last time I saw him—the very last time—was yonder at the depot, the cars pullin away. I watched ’til they went around the curve and that was the last I saw of him, sir, three years almost to this very day. And now the depot is ashes and dust, and the world—” She stopped, turned to Stribling. “What do you have to tell me that I have not understood already? There must be something. I have always thought I must have missed something. What is he like now? How far is he from the picture I carry in my head? If you can tell me that, then you have done me a service.”

  “I can’t tell you that,” said Stribling. “I do not know the picture you have, I only know the fellow I met on the road this mornin. He is the one who is home, not the other one.”

  She thought a moment. “The other one is dead, I suppose, isn’t he.”

  “Yes,” said Stribling, too quickly. “I mean, most of us are. You cannot—”

  “How much do you get to keep?” she asked. “How much can you bring along when you die and come back as somebody else?”

  “That is what he is wonderin himself,” said Stribling.

  “What?”

  Stribling touched her shoulder, lightly. “The mosquitoes are bad here in the shade,” he said. “Let us walk yonder where there is still a little sun.”

  They walked out into the square. They could hear bullbats squawking overhead now, and the chittering of chimney swifts. They stopped then, and Morgan sat down on a mounting block and looked at Stribling. “Tell me then,” she said.

  “He is afraid,” said Stribling.

  “Afraid?”

  Stribling knelt beside her, looked out over the square. “We have all been to a strange country, all us boys. I do not say that to condescend nor to elicit sympathy, mind—I only state it as a fact that you must agree to if you are to begin to understand.”

  “All right,” she said. She wrapped her arms around her knees and watched him.

  “A strange country indeed,” said Stribling. He shifted, aware for the first time how tired he was, how his bones ached. He rubbed his swollen knuckle, then laughed. “I used to think I would know when we left it, used to dream of the day when I could look behind me and there would be the bourne of that unhappy place—the ramparts or fence or stone wall or whatever it might be—and, having seen it, could turn my face from it and look up the road to home. But I was mistaken. You don’t ever leave it, not altogether, not all of you—some part is always there, and that’s the boy you knew, I reckon. What comes out is whatever is left, and something new as well, something you picked up on your travels—does that make any sense atall?”

  “Go on,” she said.

  “All right. Have you ever known a person who nearly died and was come to life again—or maybe seen one of these old-time river baptizins where the person comes up out of the water?”

  “I have seen them, yes.”

  “Then you know how that fellow looks around—and you know that he is lookin at the world in a way he never had before and might never again. Suddenly it is all a bright mystery and nothing is familiar, not even the ones he loved in the old life. I have seen that, and seen, just for an instant, how afraid they are. You can’t be not afraid when you wake to life again.”

  “All right,” she said.

  “All right. So he is afraid, Gawain is. That is why he didn’t come see you today. That is what I want to tell you. I don’t know how much you get to bring out with you, I only know it has to be enough.” He looked at her, smiled again. “You know exactly what I am talkin about, don’t you?”

  She nodded and rested her chin on her knees. “Yes. There is more than one strange country; that is why I am afraid, too.”

  “Then you know he will come in his own time,” said Stribling. “He ain’t so afraid that he won’t do that.”

  She let out a long sigh and shook her head. “We are all gone mad, aren’t we?”

  “I don’t see how it could be otherwise,” said Stribling.

  They sat awhile longer while the dusk gathered around them, talking of things beyond madness, beyond sorrow and fear: the color of the sky, the sweet rain, the ephemeral promise of tomorrow. Harry Stribling had not talked to a woman in a long while, and he was glad to discover that he had not forgotten how. But it could not last; Stribling knew that such a moment was not supposed to last, that it had its own axis, its own turning, one that was easy enough to detect. So he played it out as long as he could, waiting for her to bring up Gawain again. At last she did, but not in the way he expected.

  “You are a strange man, Captain Stribling,” she said. “I can see why Gawain Harper would take to you, for he is pretty strange himself. But why did you do this, go to all this trouble?”

  Stribling shrugged. “I don’t know. Because I am a busybody. Because we were soldiers, I guess.” He laughed. “The great fraternity of fear.”

  Her face darkened then. “I shamed Gawain Harper into joining the army, you know.” She looked at Stribling. “Why did I do that, do you suppose?” Stribling shrugged. “Why do we do anything?”

  She laughed then, real laughter, and lighter now. “A glib answer, sir, worthy of a philosopher.”

  “That’s my trade now,” said Stribling, grinning.

  “I thought so,” she said. She rose, walked a little way up and down, her hands clasped before her. “Do you suppose that’s why he hasn’t come around? Because he blames—”

  “He blames nobody, least of all you,” said Stribling.

  She looked at him. “And you, sir? Who do you blame?”

/>   “Nobody,” said Stribling. “Not yet, anyhow. If I find out who was responsible, I’ll let you know. In the meantime, you might give us old soldiers a little rope.”

  “I suppose I must,” she said, and smiled. “Well, I am awfully tired,” she said. “And there is a curfew.”

  “Will you let me walk you home?” said Stribling, rising stiffly to his feet.

  “No, thank you,” she said. “And you are supposed to be a prisoner anyhow.” She half-turned as if to go, then stopped. “I am obliged to you,” she said. Then she laughed again. “When he first went away, in the springtime, I used to imagine him returning on horseback—can you imagine?—among gay banners and pennoned lances and music—Gawain, for pity’s sake. Oh, I cringe to think on it now.”

  “Well, he was kind of on horseback,” said Stribling. “There was a horse in the party, anyway.”

  She put out her hand, and Stribling took it, and they stood thus for a moment as the twilight grew around them. Then she turned and was gone. Stribling watched her walk away, lifting her skirts out of the mud, until he could see her no more. He stood a moment longer, looking out over the burnt square, listening to the crickets, the katydids, listening to the sound of an axe chopping somewhere. The light was soft now, dissolving; the treetops glowed as if the light was leaving them upward. “Morgan Rhea,” he said. Then he turned at last, and as he moved back through the deepening shadows of the trees, he thought of Zeke. The boy had been too many nights in the open; it would be nice to find a place for him.

  He was still thinking about Zeke when he came into the clearing, so was surprised to find the horse gone from the fence and nowhere in sight. Then he remembered Nobles and his errand.

  “Brother Carl has left us,” said Peck when Stribling came up to the boxcar. “I would escape myself, but I think they might feed us after a while. And, oh—Carl said he would try to find some corn for your horse.”

  Stribling nodded and looked away toward the south. Yes, he thought, some corn would be nice for the boy—maybe Nobles could find some. And a little good water, too: clear and shining, warm from the sun, so smooth it would mirror the stars.