The Year of Jubilo

by Bahr, Howard;

  In a few moments, Burduck came to the bridge across Leaf River, and halfway across he paused. He could smell the trees, lush and green and heavy with moisture, and the hot planks drying in the sun. The birds were quiet at this hour, but in the grass the crickets sang, their incessant voices punctuated by the click of grasshoppers. A flight of gnats swirled in the sunlight. Sally did not like standing on the bridge, but Burduck held her there; she bobbed her head in protest and swished her tail at the gnats.

  Burduck shifted in the saddle and looked around him. He remembered a place like this in Brooklyn: a stream that in summer ran cool and slow, where the trees arched over the water and dappled it in shadow, where cattle came to drink and the boy driving them could sit in the grass among the secret voices and dream of the sea. Sally stamped a forefoot, and Burduck let her go; they walked off the bridge, the horse tossing her head. On the other side, Burduck turned her and looked back.

  The tattered mob of slaves moved behind the army like a vast, ragged quilt—old men and crones; women, some of them suckling; and frightened children, some naked; and young bucks with the sweat glistening on corded muscles—singing and praying, raising a dust cloud that could be seen for miles, and Forrest’s cavalry out there somewhere. They crowded up on the rear guard, and the soldiers could not be stopped from going among them with government rations and water and chickens stolen along the way, so Burduck went to the rear of the battalion and, with a picked detachment of men, kept them at bay, the men sometimes walking backward with fixed bayonets. So they swarmed out into the fields and marshes, lapping around the rear guard, singing and praying. Some, older ones mostly, collapsed in the heat, and around these sprang up little knots of wailing women.

  Burduck shook his head to clear it. The bridge and the road beyond lay empty, peaceful in the light and shadow. Overhead, a kettle of buzzards came drifting from the west, circling, their great wings motionless.

  Now and then, rebel horsemen appeared, emerging suddenly from some empty space among the trees, their carbines propped on their thighs. They would call to Burduck’s men, “What you gon’ do with all them niggers, Billy?” and Burduck’s Regulars would holler back “Gon’ bile em down for gum blankets!” or “Maybe gon’ run em for Congress down here—say, won’t you like that?” and the rebels: “Man, yes! And if that don’t work, you can make em gen’rals!”

  Burduck felt the sweat running down his body under the frock coat. He shook his head again, took off his cap and ran his hand through his thinning hair that was soaked with sweat. Through the trees, the sky was blue and endless, without clouds. The buzzards had gone, driven east by the winds aloft. The bridge shimmered in the heat, seemed to sway as if suspended by wires.

  The engineers laid pontoons across the nameless river, and the army took all day to cross while Burduck and his men kept the negroes back with their bayonets. It was nearly sunset when the orderly came on his lathered horse and saluted and gave Burduck the message, hastily penned on the back of an advertisement for Wheaton’s Bitters: “Hold the contraband on the east bank. You must not let them cross.” And Burduck, covered with dust and the sweat running in his eyes: “What the hell does this mean?” And the orderly: “Sir, I reckon it means don’t let the niggers cross.” And saluted again and put spurs to his horse.

  “That can’t be right,” said Burduck on the Leaf River Bridge. He seemed to hear them in the woods again, the shuffling of their bare feet, their singing, their voices lifted to God. Going down out of Egypt, they sang. Crossing into Canaan.

  So the soldiers drove them back with bayonets, Burduck riding among them, striking with the flat of his saber while they clutched his legs and begged and prayed because they knew. When they saw the river, they knew. The engineers stood ready to pull in the pontoons, and Burduck himself was the last one onto the bridge, and the engineers cut loose the pontoon behind him. On the bank, the women knelt and threw up their hands and wailed, and the old ones stood looking at the water, silent and resigned, letting their bundles drop at their feet in the churned mud. But some took to the water, and the current snatched them and spun them down under the arching trees. Others set across on logs, and Burduck’s men were running downstream on the far bank, throwing branches and driftwood in the water. Burduck backed his horse across the pontoons, the engineers pulling up the bridge behind him, and once a sergeant said he would send a pontoon back across and Burduck told him “No, damn you!” and had to threaten the man with a pistol. And he saw them drown, saw the brown water take them, their hands always the last thing to go under.

  “Freedom!” said Burduck, his voice loud in the quiet Sunday afternoon. Time was gone. He had lost it again, the old, comfortable progression of minutes and hours carried away on the brown water, swirling downstream, clutching at the sky. He dropped his cap and pressed the heels of his hands against his temples, feeling the blood pounding there, hearing the rush of it, but not loud enough to drown their voices, their singing and praying.

  “Close up! Close up!” Burduck cried, urging his horse up the muddy slope of the far bank. “Rally on the colors! Close up!” And the officers shouting and cursing, pulling the men together, forcing them away from the river and up the road after the army, and Burduck turning his horse to look for one last time: the ragged host was spread out along the far bank, all of them kneeling now, singing again, their high, keening voices echoing off the sandy bluffs. And out of the treeline a company of rebel cavalry appeared, their red flag bright against the trees, and one of them raised his carbine and fired, and Burduck heard the ball rattle in the leaves above him.

  He was crying now, his face wet with the unfamiliar tears that flowed with rivulets of sweat down his cheeks. Ashamed, he wiped his coat sleeve fiercely across his face, the broadcloth stinking of sweat and wood smoke. Then he sat absolutely still in the saddle, his arm outstretched, hand open like that of a man reaching for the next rung of a ladder. He listened, still hearing the single report of the rifle that had come to him across the afternoon. It seemed uncannily real, not something out of time but in the here and now, still echoing in the stillness. He dismounted and retrieved his cap from the mud, and for a moment he stared at the embroidered infantry bugle sewn to the front of it. The gold thread was tarnished, the enameled visor cracked and brittle. In a little while, he mounted again and turned Sally’s head to the south. As he rode, he fixed his mind on the bridge over the stream in Brooklyn, and tried to remember the last time he crossed it, and how the planks were warm under his bare feet.

  Meanwhile, at the old Wagner place, Solomon Gault lifted his eyes from the manuscript page before him. He found himself smiling, though he couldn’t say why.

  XVI

  Mister L. W. Thomas was carried on the army rolls as a sutler, one of those civilian entrepreneurs licensed to sell food, dry goods, and spirits to the soldiers. According to the Articles of War, sutlers were not to conduct business after nine at night, or “before the beating of reveille,” nor upon Sundays during church call “on the penalty of being dismissed from all future suttling.” However, in Mississippi in June of 1865, the finer points of the Articles were often obscured by realities of circumstance, especially when they applied to the Citadel of Djibouti. Thus, on this Sunday, the Citadel was still open, unreeling the spool of Saturday night into the bright hours of morning.

  The air in the room was close and stale; moreover, the place was full of smoke—everyone present seemed to have a lit cigar—and the light, as always, was dim even though the door was standing open. The patrons, few at this hour, were not saying much; they seemed content to slump in their chairs, sweat glistening on their faces, moving only to lift their glasses, and when they did speak, it was in a low, desultory way that suggested they would rather not speak at all. Sheriff Ben Luker sat in his usual place in the shadows, resting a mug of beer on the swell of his belly, a cigar stuck in the center of his mouth. His coat was pulled back to reveal a pistol in a flap holster, butt forward. He watched the room carefull
y, flicking his eyes toward every movement. Rafe Deaton sat alone, still in the dress coat, complete with shoulder scales and service stripes, that he had worn to the burying. In less than an hour, he had drunk his way through a bottle of Thomas’ cheapest whiskey, and now he had begun talking softly to himself. At another table, Nobles and Peck sat drinking quietly and smoking, a bottle between them. They had been at it for nearly twenty-four hours now, and the strain was beginning to tell in their faces. With them sat Stuart Bloodworth and Patrick Craddock, lately returned from the Army of Tennessee. At a third table sat Professor Malcolm Brown, the daguerreotypist, and Mister Henry Clyde Wooster, more animated than the rest, working in his notebook with a mechanical pencil, recording impressions for his subscribers.

  L. W. Thomas, leaning on the bar, regarded the scene and wondered idly if this was what purgatory would look like. He expected to visit that place sooner or later, and was grateful to have this time to practice for it. The damp weather made the wound in his side ache, and the nagging of it put him in mind of his mortality. Then, of course, there was the excursion to the burying ground this morning.

  He thought about that, about the boy who was put down into the cold, sodden ground, who should have been lying in his tent with a hangover. Even now, Thomas was not sure why they had gone to the burying, especially Nobles and Peck. It was none of their affair, nor any of his either, Thomas thought, as he daubed at a puddle of beer on the bar. He, L. W. Thomas, was a spy—a scout, they had called it during the war. He was good at the trade, had worked it for nearly four years in Memphis, Nashville, Chattanooga, Atlanta, all behind the Federal lines, with nothing between him and the noose but the discharge paper with General Henry Halleck’s signature cleverly forged by Thomas himself. Now he was working at it again, not for the Confederacy but for King Solomon Gault.

  Thomas had seen Gault at the burying ground, and now he thought about the man and how, in another smoky bar on a vanished afternoon, Gault had drawn him into his design. That was at the Gayoso house, away last fall, when the war was dying on the vine and everybody in Memphis was scrabbling for a place in the new order of things that lay just beyond the horizon. At the time, Thomas had marveled at the serendipity of the incident. He was “at large,” as he liked to phrase it then, and open to possibilities, and behold, Gault had insinuated himself into the crowd at the bar and in a little while—circumspectly at first, then made bold by the whiskey—began to speak of the vacuum of power, and of opportunity, and of gain down in Mississippi. That moment had led to this, and now Thomas was leaning on a makeshift bar thinking of a dead boy and purgatory with the rats gnawing at his side.

  But that was all right. Gault had set him up here and paid a good wage for Thomas’ sketches of the camp and the powder magazine, the barn where the stores and munitions were kept, and the blockhouses along the railroad. He received with great solemnity Thomas’ detailed weekly submissions of troop strengths, ration issues, and railway schedules. Gault enjoyed the notion, encouraged by Thomas, that the Citadel of Djibouti was a froth of conspirators, secret messages, midnight cabals, where every Southern ear was tuned to the loose talk of drunken bluebellies. In fact, Thomas encouraged all of his patron’s broad fantasies, so long as they were made incarnate in genuine Federal notes, of which Thomas now had a goodly store tucked away in a leather valise under his cot in the back room. So it was all right, this lingering in a smoky, foul-smelling tavern in a burned-out backwater village. Soon enough, Mister L. W. Thomas would take his fat valise and board the cars for the north—St. Louis, he thought, where there were good doctors—and Gault and Nobles and Peck and the rest of these damned fools would be left to fry in their own grease. For Mister L. W. Thomas had no faith whatever in Captain Gault’s design, and when the play opened, Thomas intended to be sitting at the bar in the Planter’s Hotel, reading about it in the St. Louis papers.

  And the sooner the better, Thomas reflected, as he poured a beer for himself. He blew the foam off, then lifted the glass and held it at eye level and watched it tremble in his hand. He was thirty-eight years old and had long ago learned to dispense with all illusions about himself, and he understood that he had finally lost his nerve. He had seen it happen to others, and he had seen them make fatal mistakes because of it. That was not the way of Thomas. He was an actor above all, and he knew very well when it was time to make his exit.

  Yet he had gone to the burying this morning, contrary to everything he had learned in his years on the scout. He had fallen asleep about daylight, sitting upright in his chair, while the storm wore itself out in distant mutterings to the east. Then Nobles woke him and announced that they were going to see the boy put under, and Thomas had gone without question, violating his own rule of invisibility. He had, in fact, felt compelled to go, not by his companions but by an inner voice he had labored for years to silence. It was the voice of remorse, and its nagging persistence was the final proof that his nerve was gone at last.

  Remorse had no place in the trade. You did your job, and usually men died because of it, and sometimes they were innocent. That was the nature of war, and there was no getting around it. When you started feeling, it was time to quit.

  Only this was not war. The boy under the bridge had lived through that, suffered that, and was supposed to be safe from it now. Thomas looked out at the room. The bright, sunlit rectangle of the open door beckoned to him. He could do it right now; he could go behind the curtain and pack his few books and his pistol and mandolin—hell, he would leave the mandolin and get him a better one—and walk right past Luker, the Captain’s watchdog, and out the door and down to the railroad and away from this wretched hole forever. He could go to a place where the war really was over, where he would never again have to hear the clods splashing in the bottom of a water-filled grave. He could do it. Right now. There was nothing to keep him from it. Nothing nothing nothing, said the voice in his head. Go on now, while you got the chance, before you do something you’ll wish you hadn’t—

  Then the light from the door was broken by the silhouette of a man, and Thomas squinted his eyes, thinking with a sudden pang that his scheming might have evoked the presence of Gault himself. But no, it wasn’t the Captain, thank God. Thomas went on sipping his beer, watching the stranger while the voices in his head spoke urgently of freedom.

  WHEN HARRY STRIBLING stepped out of the bright afternoon and through the door of the Citadel, he was nearly overcome by cigars and sweat and stale beer. The stink was palpable and wrapped around him like a damp garment. He stood blinking in the dim light, waiting for his senses to adjust, conscious of the faces turned his way. Finally, when he could see to navigate, he moved across the room to the bar where L. W. Thomas was watching him.

  “Hey there,” said Stribling amiably.

  Thomas nodded. “Hey,” he said.

  “Hot, ain’t it?”

  “Yeah,” said Thomas. “It is.”

  “Looks like the rain’s quit for a while.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Thomas.

  Stribling turned and leaned his back against the bar and looked out at the room. He nodded at Nobles and Peck. From the corner of his eye, he could see a fat man watching him from the shadows. Stribling grinned. “God bless all here,” he said.

  “What you want?” asked Thomas.

  “Who is the little fat man over yonder?” asked Stribling, still smiling out at the room and its sulky occupants.

  Thomas snorted. “That is the high sheriff his own self,” he said. “Why?”

  “Just curious,” said Stribling. “Did you vote for him?”

  “I don’t think anybody did,” said Thomas.

  “I wonder if Solomon Gault did.”

  Caught by surprise, Thomas almost let his face betray him. “I wouldn’t know,” he said.

  Stribling nodded, as if everything was clear to him now. He looked at Ben Luker and smiled and tipped his hat. “Hey there,” he said.

  Luker leaned his chair away from the wall, stood up, moved
to the bar and set his mug down. He had to look up at Stribling, who was nearly a head taller. “I ain’t seen you before.”

  “No,” said Stribling. “No, you ain’t.”

  Luker moved closer, sliding his mug down the bar so that it left a wet trail. “You just travelin?” he asked.

  “I was until I got here,” said Stribling.

  Ben Luker grinned, showing a single upper front tooth with a crescent of decay. “Is that right?” he said.

  “Actually,” Stribling went on, “I thought I might linger awhile. I make enough friends, I might run for sheriff next election day.”

  “Job’s already taken,” said Ben Luker.

  “That’s too bad,” said Stribling. “I’d like to meet the man.”

  “You already did,” said Luker. He pulled back the skirt of his sack coat so that Stribling could see the pistol and the dull gleam of a badge that reminded Stribling of the star-and-crescent pins he had seen infantrymen wear on occasion. Luker said, “You know what? I think I have seen you before. You the feller they th’owed in jail last Friday, damn if you ain’t.”

  “Well, I suppose I am,” said Stribling. “Yes, I am he—Harry Stribling, the famous outlaw.”

  “They didn’t ask my help,” said Luker. “If they had, you might not be so goddamn smart.”

  “Aw, Ben,” said Thomas, “let the man alone. Have another beer.” He moved to take Luker’s mug, but the sheriff covered it with the palm of his hand.

  “Let me ask you a question,” said Stribling in a confidential whisper.

  “Sure,” said the sheriff, leaning toward him, grinning.