ONCE THE COURTHOUSE bell would have tolled the hour, the slow, measured strokes of noon, and the hotel dinner bell would ring. No bells now, but still the pause, the moment when the day seemed to turn, and the morning ceased, and afternoon began. The clouds, impossibly white against the blue sky, gathered pile upon pile, shifting, moving across the sun then away again so that the earth was by turns shadowed and bright. Now and then a strong breeze, moving ahead of the coming rain, shuddered in the trees, and the leaves of maples turned their pale undersides to the light. Chimney swifts swirled above the houses, riding higher and higher on the rising heat. Hawks circled, and buzzards over the country fields. A southbound locomotive, with four empty flats and a cabin car, crept uneasily over the ramshackle Tallahatchie River bridge; when it blew for an isolated crossing, the sound of its whistle could be heard for miles. Everywhere, through the color and the brightness and the shadow of afternoon, all things followed time, and all persons followed time.
In the Carter boy’s room, Morgan was reading Les Misérables, now and then watching out the window toward the lane. Alex practiced sword fighting in the yard and kept an eye on the weather, and the Judge paced in the library, and old Mister Carter searched for France’s grave in the woods behind the house.
After dinner, Gawain’s father nodded in his chair by the window, muttering and moving his hands, while below Uncle Priam poked at the fire on the kitchen hearth. Stribling went to work on the crib to make a place for Zeke, and in a little while, Aunt Vassar brought out a pitcher of water and spoke to him:
“I am sorry about all that in yonder,” she said, waving her hand toward the house.
“I can think of ten thousand reasons why you ought not to be,” said Stribling, and they talked a long time while the wasps buzzed about their heads.
At the Citadel of Djibouti, L. W. Thomas leaned his elbows on the bar and talked quietly with Marcus Peck and Carl Nobles. Sheriff Luker propped his chair against the wall in the shadows and listened. Behind the tavern, Queenolia Divine sat on a keg by Town Creek, fishing. Old Hundred-and-Eleven, worn out from his morning’s exertions at the graveyard, snored in a corner of the deserted boxcar jail while the sentry walked to and fro. In the shade beneath the car, Dauncy was showing Jack the best way to sharpen a pocket knife. In the camp, Captain Bloom’s company stood at parade rest on the color line and listened as their Colonel spoke to them. Their eyes were drawn to the blanket-shrouded litter at the Colonel’s feet, but Rafe Deaton would not look at it; he twisted the socket ring of his bayonet and looked off toward the railroad. In the woods below Leaf River, Molochi Fish set a pot of greens on the fire; a few miles away, Wall Stutts was still asleep after the rigors of the night, lying in the dogtrot of his cabin on the old Gault place. King Solomon Gault himself sat at his desk in the farm office where he lived now that his house was burned. Soon he would ride out to Yellow Leaf Church to visit his wife in the graveyard, but for now, he was taking an hour to work on his memoirs:
For what is defeat or shame, what the delusion of freedom under oppression? Only self-imposed shackles of the mind; debilitating in some; in others, subject to the will, readily broken, cast away, then forgotten in the tasks of renewed struggle or in the oblivion of the grave. That last morning, as I bid farewell to my gallant troop …
So all these followed time as they must, all traveling together through the noon and afternoon, while the rain moved in from the west where the Great River lay. Gawain Harper journeyed that way, too, with this difference: only he, among them all, was aware of it, could sense their passage, could hear it almost like the long flocks of blackbirds that whispered overhead in a winter twilight.
When he left his aunt’s house, Gawain retraced the path he and Stribling had taken earlier, through the side yard, through the woods and around the back of the old Academy. The path he was taking now was not a conscious choice, any more than the geese had chosen what arc they would take in the night, or what star to navigate by—but it was a choice, he told himself. He merely went, trusting in the way.
Presently, he found himself on the grounds of the Academy again. In the shifting diffusion of light among the trees, the buildings rose like old ruined abbeys. Speckled with leaf shadow, vines already taken hold, they seemed the ancient remnants of a struggle long healed and forgotten, too old even for ghosts to remember. But Gawain Harper remembered. He put his hand against the bricks and knew that they were real, knew he had been here once and now had returned and too much had happened in between. In that moment in the dining room, he had glimpsed, perhaps for the last time, the world that had shaped him. Now he was following time again, he and all the rest, toward something—the stones in the burying ground, confrontations, freedom perhaps, or peace, he couldn’t say. It should not have bothered him, he knew—he would make his choices, they all would, and the seasons would go on, and the moon and sun, and the planets in their wandering. But right now he could see beyond the light a darkness he did not want to enter, but that drew near him, near them all, as surely as the coming night.
After a time, Gawain came to the shell of the building he and Stribling had visited that morning. This time, he climbed the steps, his feet crunching in the glass, and tried the door. The latch gave to his hand and he hesitated, knowing full well what he would see, and knowing he could never be ready for it. He pushed the door. It opened on nothing. Gawain blinked and almost fell, pulled into the emptiness. He caught the door frame and hung there, leaning out into space. In a little while he steadied himself, pushed away and sat on the step again. He took the rosary from his pocket and began to tell the beads.
XV
Saturday’s rain terrified and delighted Alex Rhea beyond all his imaginings. A little after two o’clock, the clouds thickened and turned black, and the day darkened so that birds sought their, roosting. Presently, the sky turned a sickly green behind the clouds, and the lightning flickered. There were distant rumblings, and the wind thrashed in the trees. Alex, his face stung by dust and leaves driven by the wind, stood on the widow’s walk atop old Carter’s house and watched in awe as the slanted veils of rain swept in from the west. Suddenly a blinding flash drew all the world in stark outline, and an instant later the thunder seemed to explode just above his head, and Alex ran for the trapdoor and the narrow stairs. When the rain struck, it did not announce itself with patterings but came all at once and full blown like old Noah’s deluge must have done.
All evening and night the rain hammered the earth, the lightning sparked, thunder rattled windows in their sashes. Trees groaned and sighed, and some in their writhing uprooted themselves and fell, and shingles flew like leaves, and tents pulled up their stakes and fluttered away like frantic ghosts. A man was killed by a falling limb, an infant drowned in the high waters of Town Creek.
Sunday morning, as if in apology, the sky was clear and benign, and the air washed clean. People emerged from whatever shelter they had found and looked meekly about, as after a great battle. They had been humbled, reminded of how little power they possessed and how helpless they really were. They seemed astonished, disappointed almost, that the world had not changed to any great degree. Then the axes began, and the saws, and the sound of voices calling to one another across the morning, and the people forgot until next time.
In the Federal camp, the soldiers repaired their tents and rebuilt their fires and ate breakfast squatting on their heels on the sodden ground. Then the drums beat assembly, and Captain Bloom’s company was paraded on the color line for church call. Tom Kelly was about to be committed to the earth, his vessel a plain box nailed together from the weatherboards of an abandoned house. The box waited on the color line. On the lid, a cavalry farrier had burned the soldier’s name, his regiment, his dates—a futile gesture, for such a coffin would not last long down below.
These troops had a chaplain once, a Unitarian and vocal abolitionist from the East. He had not been in Cumberland long before Old Hundred-and-Eleven called him out on the doctrine of the Tri
nity. The discussion heated up, Old Hundred-and-Eleven smote the chaplain with a stick of firewood, and the man left the next morning for Massachusetts again, shaking the dust of the wild frontier from his feet. So it was that, when the troops had been paraded and inspected and read the orders of the day, Colonel Burduck came out on the field accompanied by a wizened little man in an old-fashioned black frock coat and wing collar and steel spectacles: the Reverend Roy Spaulding of the Cumberland Methodist Church who, because Kelly had been a Methodist himself, had been asked to preside. The old man accepted at once. He did not mention that his own church had been reduced to cinders by the army to which Tom Kelly belonged.
The minister stood beside the Colonel for a moment, clutching his Testament, his head bowed. Then he lifted his face and spoke. His voice was strong and clear; the soldiers would say later that it was more of a voice than such a dried-up little fellow ought to have. Moreover, they would tell how the man never once mentioned sin or hell or the futility of earthly deeds, never once invited them to look into their own souls to see if salvation dwelt there. Instead, he began by asking their forgiveness that he should presume to speak of a boy he never knew. Then he spoke of humility, of mercy, of grief—even God’s grief that such a boy should be finished so soon. When he was done, he turned to the Colonel and asked if the men might kneel. The Colonel spoke to the Captain, the Captain gave the commands, and the men grounded arms and knelt in place in the mud. Above them the regimental and national colors whisked in the warm breeze. Old Spaulding turned his voice to God then, and asked that young Tom Kelly be forgiven for whatever sins he had managed to commit in his twenty years, and that God welcome him and be kind to him, for he would surely be afraid. When he was finished, the troops were brought to attention again, the musicians called to the front, and Tom Kelly was borne to the graveyard to the beat of the slow march.
The soldiers’ burying ground was deep in mud and standing water. Captain Bloom’s company formed a hollow square around the grave, the first time this ground had seen such a display for a private of the line. Reverend Spaulding offered a final prayer, then the box was lowered with ropes by four soldiers, Rafe Deaton among them; it made a squelching sound at the bottom, for the grave was deep in water. Colonel Burduck, at the head of the grave, nodded once to Dauncy and Jack who were standing by with their shovels. The brothers bent to their work, with Old Hundred-and-Eleven looking on from beneath his umbrella. As the first heavy clods of mud struck the coffin lid, the troops were brought to shoulder arms. In a moment they marched away, the drums beating a quick march now.
A scattering of civilian spectators watched a little distance from the grave. Henry Clyde Wooster had already filled three pages in his notebook. At the edge of the gathering were L. W. Thomas and Carl Nobles, and Marcus Peck leaning on his crutches. Their eyes were red and swollen from drink, for they had spent the night in the Citadel listening to the wind pushing at the boards. Now they stood without speaking, their faces showing nothing. Nearby stood Captain King Solomon Gault. His eyes were lively and quick, darting here and there under the brim of his broad straw hat. This morning he wore a tan sack coat and fawn-colored breeches and a brocade waistcoat and good boots, for he was on his way to morning prayer. He nodded approvingly as the Federal troops executed the maneuvers necessary to come from a hollow square into line. When they marched away, the drums stirred him as they always had, and it was all he could do to keep from applauding. If only he could have commanded such troops as these—but never mind. He would do the best with what he had. He turned to the man lounging next to him in the sparse gathering of townsmen. “Well done,” he said.
Wall Stutts nodded and spat a stream of ambure after the departing soldiers. “Sho’, Cap’n,” he said. “Whatever you say.”
HARRY STRIBLING HAD left the house at daybreak. He saddled Zeke in the cool dawning and rode north up the Holly Springs road for a few miles to take the air, then doubled back to Cumberland. Just past the house again, he cut cross-country, guiding Zeke through the fields and woodlots, feeling like he was on the scout again. It was hard going in some places; the storm had done great damage (though he had slept through it all in Gawain’s sisters’ room, in a girl’s narrow sleigh bed that still smelled faintly of talc) and they had to hunt for a passage now and then. The swollen creek was a problem, too, but they found a ford just south of the railroad bridge. Once across, the going was easier; they sauntered past the burned depot and the boxcar jail and approached the Federal camp; the wind was from the south, and they could smell the fires and the breakfast cooking, and Stribling’s stomach growled in response. When he heard the drums beating church call, Stribling found a place among some willows near the railroad, dug out his spyglass from a saddlebag, and waited. Presently he lifted the glass and through it watched the column enter the burying ground, the drums beating a slow march and the infantry coming along at right shoulder shift. Again he felt like he was back in the old times, scouting for Chalmers, counting bayonets, but he shook it off and concentrated on the civilians tagging along at the end of the procession. He was surprised to see Nobles and Thomas; they were shambling along, helping the one-legged Irishman Peck through the mud. The others he did not know, though one of them caught his eye: a well-appointed gentleman in a tan sack coat whom he somehow recognized, though he had never seen the man before. “Solomon Gault,” he said, lowering the glass. “It’s got to be him, Zeke.”
“That’s him all right.”
For an instant, the mad notion cut across Stribling’s mind that the horse had answered him, but Zeke was already sidestepping nervously and about to tangle himself in a blowdown, and Stribling had to fight to get him settled. By then he had seen the man—he had appeared out of the trees without a sound. Stribling cursed himself for a greenhorn, a fool who could be bushwhacked three times now in the broad light of day. “Goddammit,” he said. “I am tired of these surprises. What you doin here?”
“It’s a free country,” said Molochi Fish. “Or ain’t you heard?”
GAWAIN HARPER WOKE to a grievous headache; he had been afflicted by them ever since the fight in Georgia when he was knocked in the head by a rock-hard lump of clay. That is how he thought of it, for being knocked in the head had always been his aunt’s idea of the worst thing that could happen to anybody. When he was a child, she would say, “You keep goin in those woods by yourself, somebody gon’ knock you in the head.” Later, it was “You go up to Memphis by yourself, somebody gon’ knock you in the head” or “I wouldn’t put my foot in that place, be afraid I’d get knocked in the head,” and so on. Gawain always made light of her fear, but when he finally was knocked in the head, he understood the gravity of it. He was reminded of it this morning, as he groped in his bag for the physic powder a druggist in Meridian had sold him.
He felt better after breakfast and declared his intention of taking his aunt to morning prayer. He looked for Stribling to invite him as well, but that gentleman, old Priam said, had saddled up before daylight and ridden off somewhere. Aunt Vassar took a while to get ready, so the bells were already ringing when they set off through the morning for Holy Cross church.
The troubling thoughts of the previous day did not follow Gawain Harper into the sunlight. Although his head still pained him some, his mind was clear, and no weight rested on his heart. He thought he looked pretty dashing in his brushed clothes and watch chain and walking stick, with his hat slanted over one eye and the prayer book under his arm. Nothing bad was happening to him right now, and he walked in the moment as he had learned to do when he could. Aunt Vassar was in her usual black, but she, too, seemed at ease, and talked lightly as they went along. Gawain’s only immediate regret was that Morgan was not Episcopalian, so would not be there to admire him. Well, maybe after dinner he would slip over to the Carter house in his finery.
They sat in their old pew, and Gawain looked about him determined not to be hurt by what he might see. Many of the old faces were gone, and those remaining had a gau
nt look. They had aged some, his friends of the old time. But they spoke to him kindly, and in their voices Gawain heard the echoes of all they had been to him, and by their touch he knew them to be real. The church itself was shabbier than he remembered, the pews and the floors creakier, the windows grimy. But the smell was the same—candles, old women, books—and the same wasps still buzzed lazily over their heads. The women’s fans still fluttered, and the men ran their fingers around the inside of their collars as they always had.
Father Garrison’s successor was a younger man, tall, nervous in his movements. His speaking voice had all the marks of the Virginia seminary from which he’d graduated. As the priest began the litany, Gawain had a thought. He leaned over to his aunt and whispered against her ear: “Say, Aunt.”
“Hush,” she replied.
“But I want to ask you somethin,” Gawain persisted.
“What?” she hissed.
“I want to ask you—back last summer, did the yankees keep their horses up in here?”
“What in the nation are you talkin about?” said his aunt.
“Thank you,” Gawain said.
The Year of Jubilo Page 24