MORGAN RHEA SAW the pale light of moonrise creep in her window. It fell across her brother Alex where he lay on a pallet on the floor; he stirred as if the light had brushed him, muttered some incoherent plea, then flung his arm out. His open hand lay like a night-blooming flower on the dark rug. Morgan watched him, wondering, as she always did, what pictures moved in his dreams. He had not slept well since their house was burned.
Morgan remembered the burning. The yankee General Hatch’s men had forbidden them to take anything from the house but the clothes they wore that afternoon. They had stood in a cluster on the lawn—Mama and Alex and Morgan and the old negro Robert, who had not run away but who would die before the leaves turned—and they watched the house burn. Morgan forced herself to watch it, from the moment the flames licked through the windows until the last wall had crumbled, fallen back into the glowing ashes of everything they had owned, every material thing that had defined them. Her father’s reputation had brought the yankees swarming into the yard, had sent the smoke rising in a great black pillar toward the sky. His intractable will had torched the house as surely as if he’d laid the fire himself, and now he stood apart from them as he had when the news of Lily came, offering no comfort, his back turned to the burning house, his eyes fixed on whatever it was he imagined lay beyond tomorrow. On that afternoon, she had hated her father with a bitterness hotter than the fire itself, and she believed, hoped, desired—demanded, almost—that it consume her as the fire consumed the house, wishing it would use up everything inside her and leave nothing but a shell, graceless and unfeeling and cold.
Not long afterward, she thought that what she had wished for among the smoke had been accomplished. At first, waking and sleeping, her mind prowled through the rooms of the vanished house, noticing things in memory that she had forgotten, hardly looked at, in life—things she needed, wanted to put her hand to and couldn’t because they were gone forever. Then the emptiness she had wished for seemed to come upon her, and she put all that away at last. If she had made herself watch the house die, she could make herself quit watching it in memory, and so she did. Her waking hours became a long, vacant corridor through which she moved. When she walked about the town, her skirts dragging in the ashes, she had to remind herself that she was alive, that the faces she looked into were alive, that the faces and voices and the footprints in the mud were real and would not vanish with the cock’s crowing. Then, when her father declared his intention of leaving this place forever, even the fact that she was alive ceased to matter. She had taken the news without interest. South America, Mexico, California, any one of the planets that whirled among the stars—no matter. A widow without prospects, she would go. She would take care of the old folks, and of Alex until he grew away, and one day she would be old, and another day she, like Lily, would cease to be at all.
Now she sat on the bed while the moonlight filled the window. She was still clothed, though her feet were bare; in the last hour, she had told herself a dozen times she would put her nightgown on and climb under the covers where it was dark and no one could get at her, but she hadn’t. For the first time in many months—seasons, years it seemed—Morgan wished she could cry.
Crying was good, once. She had never been ashamed to cry, never thought of it as a weakness, never hesitated to employ it to her advantage. All her life she had cried easily, when she was angry or happy, sad or tired or sick, when the mystery of life moved her, when she wanted something she could get by no other means. All these, she felt, were legitimate reasons to cry, and the tears themselves but outward signs of her fervent heart—or (she was not afraid to admit) the handiest weapons in her arsenal. But crying was another thing she had lost the means for; it had come to seem so paltry a thing, and she had scorned it so long, and though she wished for it now, she knew it was denied her.
So she sat and listened to the night sounds, and to her brother’s soft breathing, and to the tick of the clock on the mantel. That clock had been the Carter boy’s. This was his room they occupied in Mister T. J. Carter’s house, his bed she slept in, his things that lay on the dresser and hung in the wardrobe. Mister Carter had left them just as they were, and she had touched them all, remembering the boy’s face, trying to see the room as he had seen it before he went away with the Cumberland Rifles and never came home again. Once in the early spring, she thought she had seen him. She came in the room at dusk and caught something that had just gone away—a shape, more a shadow than anything. She had not been afraid; in fact, she spoke his name, half-believing, half-hoping he might appear. But there was only the quiet end of day, golden and soft, and the silence of the empty room. She had not seen him again, nor had any sense of his being there. He was gone; she did not believe he would return.
So many were gone, and Morgan wondered sometimes where they were now—even her husband, whose face she could barely remember, who had died in California long before there was any war he might have gone to. She believed ghosts dwelt in the places they had known in life, but somehow these lost ones were different. They seemed not ghosts but empty intervals in the air, the light, as if the spaces were there waiting with nothing to fill them. As she moved about the town, past the galleries of houses and the blank doorways of burned-out stores, she had felt, in spite of herself, a strange sympathy with those who had gone. Here was a certain clump of chinaberry trees, there the pond by the old cowpens, there the hollow shell where Terrible Miss Chastain kept her school once. In all these places, Morgan felt—could almost see, she thought—an emptiness more complete, more final, than her own. The lost ones were dead, of course; she knew that, could understand that. But it was as if they had all returned once, like the Carter boy, and then gone again, leaving behind these vacancies in the air. She thought it might be the violence of their passing, the infinite waste and madness into which their lives had disappeared. Or the sorrow of it, perhaps—of coming once more to the places they had known, only to find that life was trudging on without them. Morgan could not say; she only knew that they were gone, and none of them lingered. She was glad, in a way, for she did not believe their souls could be at peace here. Let them go; it was enough that they had come to say goodbye.
Eventually she had allowed herself to believe that Gawain Harper was one of these lost ones. She had not grieved—that she could not allow—but she had taken to watching for him as she walked past Vassar Bishop’s old house at odd times of the day, or strolled among the grim, eyeless walls of the burned Academy. She believed that she would see him if he returned, and that it would be in one of those places. She pictured him in a short gray jacket like the one the Carter boy had worn, with the same sad look in his eyes. He would be standing by the porch or perhaps in the place where his classroom used to be, where he had leaned on the mantel and listened to her read in a distant springtime. She knew that, if he came, she would have only time enough to lift her hand to him and speak. She could see it all in her mind, could see her hand and see her lips move. But she could not hear what it was she said to him, nor what he might say in reply. Then he would be gone, and she could see in her mind the empty place where he had been.
But he had never come, and now she understood why. Because he was alive too. That was the news the stranger had brought. Gawain had lived after all, was in the world, was even home now, probably at his Aunt Vassar’s house this very moment. The thought brushed over her with a chill, and she realized she could not picture him now. She could see him dead, but not alive—what did that say about her? What did it say about them all? Only this afternoon, listening to the words Captain Stribling spoke, did she know how strongly she had believed in Gawain Harper’s death, and how completely it had shaped the empty corridors of her days. Now the rules had changed, or at least the players had, and the pieces. Now the knight was back on the board.
She heard a whippoorwill. She had heard him every night since the early spring, but tonight he seemed closer, almost under her window. The query of the bird made her shiver again, as if he had s
poken her name. She rose, found her shawl and, with one more glance at Alex, passed out of the room and closed the door behind her.
The house was still. It smelled of mildew, of neglect, of old people with their powders and physics and rusty clothes. Mister T. J. Carter had long since ceased to care about the house, and nothing Morgan or her mother said could stir the old man from his dream; no amount of bustling or cleaning could rid the house of its emptiness. Worse, Mister Carter still talked of his boy as if he were only gone down to the post office and might return at any moment, and there was nothing anyone could say to that.
She passed the front parlor, saw the dim flicker of a candle there, and by it the white crown of old Carter’s head where he sat by the cold hearth. He was waiting even now, she thought, listening for a footstep on the porch, a tap at the window, the creak of a stair. One day soon, her family would be gone, and old Carter would be left here all alone, listening still. But not for long, she thought. He would not be here long.
Morgan, silent in her bare feet, glided by the parlor door, and in a moment stood on the broad gallery, looking up at the square columns that had taken the light of the moon. The whippoorwill had hushed his calling, but there were other voices, solitary and indifferent: the crickets, an owl, the reedy piping of toads down by the garden pond. She gathered her shawl around her and sat down on the front steps. “Gawain Harper,” she said aloud, testing the sound of it. Then, louder: “Gawain?” She spoke into the dark, got only the sound of crickets in return. They fiddled blithely, and gave no answer she could use. “Gawain Harper, damn you anyhow!” she said, and her voice caught in her throat, and without any warning she began to cry.
GAWAIN HARPER HAD never felt so alone. Never. He almost regretted leaving the house, almost wished he would stumble on a provost guard or a sentry just so he could hear a voice. But he kept to the shadows away from the main road, moving through the silent streets and yards toward something he could not name, was not sure he wanted to find. He knew only that he had to seek it, whatever it was, and that this was the time. And he knew this was better than the house, better than the dead air and the silence.
He marveled at how far he’d come in twenty-four hours. Last night at this time, he was lying on his cousin’s gallery, watching the starlight on the road, wondering what he would find in the day ahead. Now he was here with the day behind him, and old Dial Ethridge, and the little fyce, and Molochi Fish, and Harry Stribling, and the fight at the tavern, and Aunt Vassar and his father. He wondered how old Harry was doing. In the morning, he would find out where he was and go see him and try to get him off. For now, though, he had to—
Had to what? He knew the answer to that, though he was careful with the thought. Honor was more fragile than he had ever imagined—that was one lesson he had learned amid the smoke.
He was behind the ruins of what had been the north side of the square when he heard them. Heart pounding, he slipped into the deep shadow of a wall and watched as a pair of cavalrymen—a provost guard, no doubt—passed by on the road, their horses’ hooves squelching in the mud. They passed so close he could have counted the coils around their picket pins: Federal cavalry, for God’s sake, taking their ease in the moonlight on the square in Cumberland, while Gawain Harper, citizen, cowered unarmed in the lee of the old Jenkins Hardware.
He waited in the shadow until his heart settled down and his breath had returned. What was the worst that could happen if they found him? Run him home. Clap him in the guardhouse. They will not shoot you, boy, he told himself.
The Carter house was east of the square, almost to the Episcopal cemetery where his mother lay beneath her weeping maiden of stone. In a little while, he turned that way, crossing the broad Holly Springs road, crouched and running like a fugitive. Had he looked up the road, he might have seen the shape of his own house where it sat in the bend, windows dark under the looming of the oaks. Instead he glanced south, and what he saw made him stop in the shadows and look again. On the far side of the square, a soldier was passing. Aunt Vassar had said the soldiers could go down to the tavern at night, and sometimes they got into devilment along the way. But Gawain saw in this lad the unmistakable carriage of one who wanted only to get to his blankets; forward-leaning, weaving at the quick march, the soldier reminded Gawain of himself on many a night in camp. The notion made him grin, and in spite of himself he felt a sympathy toward this unknown drunk who, but for the fortunes of war, might have been his comrade. He was about to turn away when another movement caught his eye. There, in the indistinct shadows across the square, might have been a second man; Gawain couldn’t say for sure, and he peered hard across the moonlight, strangely uneasy all at once, as if his mind had registered something that his eyes had not seen. But the soldier had disappeared, and there was no more movement, and after a moment Gawain turned and passed between the chimneys of the old Bank of Cumberland, rattling boards and making a mess of his boots in the sodden ash.
OH, CRYING HAD always been a good thing, yes, but tonight it was different. When she used to cry, first her emotions gave notice: an overture of sniffling, a burning in the eyes, a peculiar sensation under the bridge of her nose. Tonight, as she sat on the porch under the rising moon, Morgan Rhea was caught by surprise. The tears burst out of her, pushed out by a great sob that she had no time to stifle. The sound of it shocked her, as if she had shouted some obscenity into the dark, and she doubled over as if from a physical blow. Rebounding, she flung away her shawl and struggled to her feet, her face already wet; she wiped at the tears, wiped again and again until her hands, too, were wet, and now she heard the sounds she made. They seemed torn from her, a groaning and wailing dragged from somewhere deep in her throat. She had not summoned them and could not will them to cease, any more than she could have willed herself from retching. They seemed louder than any sound in the world, and they terrified her. She crammed her fists in her mouth and moved away from the house, out into the tall grass of the yard where her bare feet and the hem of her dress were instantly soaked from the dew. She saw herself alone then, spinning in the moonlit yard, and now her aloneness frightened her—but she couldn’t go back, not to the house, not even to her mother who slept in a room heavy with darkness and defeat, and close with the dry smell of old people.
She made her way to one of the oaks that stretched their muscular trunks out of the grass. The trunk of this one glistened with roaches, but she didn’t care. She leaned against it, her chest hurting now, tears rolling in great drops and a thick fluid running from her nose. She wiped at this and brought away a ropy strand of it, but she didn’t care.
She heard a sound overhead as if a flock of birds were passing, and out of the shiny leaves, like rain, dark memories fell. Through the tall grass coiled long serpents, bright of scale, each one reciting its own peculiar litany of death, loss, smoke and flame, soldiers running, trains leaving—one murmuring the names of those who had gone, another hissing Who are you to think we would not come? and Nobody is strong enough—nobody, nobody—until she pulled at her hair and cried for them to cease, but they would not. Their time had come at last; they had found her in the dark alone, and she had found the grief she wished for. She sank to her knees, her body pressed tight against the oak, and covered her face and wept.
GAWAIN FINALLY GOT through the rubble of the bank (he had tripped, barked his shins, nearly fallen into the cellar) and emerged behind the buildings on the northeast corner of the square. Just beyond them, two houses still stood facing the cemetery road; he passed warily through the back yards, watching for dogs or for citizens who might take exception to his wandering at this late hour. But the houses were dark and silent, and all Gawain encountered was a cat, who allowed him to pet her before gliding off into the moonlight.
Presently, he came to the Church of the Holy Cross. He put his hand on the arched red doors and for a moment thought of entering—of going no further than the quiet, candle-smelling darkness of the old sanctuary where even time trod gently, where t
he silence held you for as long as you would be held, for as long as you needed to be held in the suspension of grace. It was an illusion, of course, but Gawain suspected that God worked by illusion sometimes, that the deepest chamber of a man’s heart was not so different from a child’s: he craved a benign mystery and the assurance that forces beyond his comprehension were working in his favor. So the temptation was strong for Gawain to enter in, to surrender himself to the silence and thus be absolved of his own foolish aims, his own will. Except he knew that would not be an illusion, it would be a lie. He had journeyed long with Death, and Death had refused him, and now he was left with freedom and life. To these he owed the responsibility of his will, and to cower in the church would satisfy nothing of the debt.
Yet, if he didn’t enter, he could at least linger in the shadow of the church for a while. He found a dark place in an angle of buttress and wall, and there he knelt. He reached into his pocket, took out the rosary, and held it. Father Denby Garrison was no more; he had shot himself in the sacristy—by accident, so Aunt Vassar had said, repeating the common wisdom. But Gawain did not believe this any more than Aunt Vassar did. The notion was as absurd as keeping horses in the Presbyterian church; it was the groping of people trying to explain by simple means a truth so complex they could not grasp it, and feared it because they could not. Gawain made the sign of the cross with the beads and offered a prayer for the priest, that good man whose thoughts, in his last moment, no one would ever know.
Gawain hardly knew what his own thoughts were, as he knelt in the shadow of Holy Cross. He had never cared much for the night; his imagination always peopled the dark with mysterious prowlers, with watchers and whisperers who knew all about his sins and showed an interest in them. And though he might tell himself that the dead were only dead, in the dark he could never be sure they believed it. If there was ever a time when the dead might visit, this ought to be it, so he clutched the rosary tightly and prayed for all the dead, trying, as he prayed, to recall the faces of those he knew, and prayed even for those he did not know, that vast assemblage who lay sprawled across the wreckage of the past three years. When he was done, he leaned against the warm bricks of the church and prayed for himself, for Morgan, for all his people, and for grace to abide.
The Year of Jubilo Page 15