“Sergeant Deaton?” said the young officer. “What has he—”
“He’s dead,” said the provost. “Get on, now. And sergeant—the tavern is on fire, and the cavalry has orders to shoot anybody who tries to put it out. Understand?”
The sergeant did not understand, but he was not about to bring that fact before Lieutenant von Arnim. He saluted, took up his musket, and was gone across the broken glass, bawling for his corporal. Von Arnim glared at the young Lieutenant.
“Osgood, damn you, where is the Colonel? Don’t tell me you don’t know.”
The officer raised his hands helplessly. “He went off for a ride, said he would be back in a few hours. What is it? What’s happened?”
“Bushwhackers,” said von Arnim. “Captain Bloom is in command until we find the Colonel. Run fetch him. Be quick.”
“Sir!” said Osgood, glad for the errand. He ran out, adjusting his sword belt over the diagonal red sash that marked him as officer of the day.
Von Arnim opened the door to the Colonel’s office and walked in. The breeze from the open window had strewn the records of Tom Kelly across the floor. Von Arnim went to the window and banged his hand against the frame. He looked out at the yard and saw that the trees along the creek were wreathed in smoke from the Citadel of Djibouti.
Old Mister Shipwright appeared beside the provost; von Arnim was occupied with his own thoughts and did not realize the other was there until he spoke. “I remember when that was new,” the old man said, pointing a crooked finger at the capsized carriage in the yard. “Don’t seem that long ago, does it?”
“I don’t know,” said von Arnim. “I wasn’t here.”
“Not long atall,” said Mister Shipwright. He squinted at the sky. “Be night before you know it,” he said, then turned and shuffled away. Von Arnim heard the old man’s slippers crunch in the glass and, a moment later, the slow tread of them up the creaking stairs.
Through the open window, the breeze brought the smell of burning and the shouts of men. Von Arnim took off his cap and wiped his forehead with his sleeve. “Deo vindice,” he said, hoping that it was so.
WALL STUTTS WAS growing restless. He should have known that Harper would stick to the house on a Sunday afternoon, though it was reasonable to expect that he’d at least take a turn around the goddamned yard. Hell, maybe he wasn’t even at the house. But Stutts had always had a reliable instinct about such things: where game would lie in the canebrakes, or what field held a good covey of birds. He knew he was in the right place; he just had to be patient, as if he were waiting by a salt lick. It was all the same.
He had seen the boy amble through the broomsage to his front, and a little while later the old nigger. Wall Stutts knew the boy—he was Judge Rhea’s—and he wondered what the brat was doing out here. Was he looking for Harper? The thought crossed Stutts’ mind that here might be a novel target indeed. If the boy came back this way—
Stutts grinned at the thought of the Captain’s face if he should tell him he’d bushwhacked the Judge’s boy. Or maybe he wouldn’t tell him, just let him find out on his own when the Judge came to call. But, no—that was a complication Wall Stutts didn’t need right now. One quarry was enough. And besides, there was the matter of the seventy-five dollars. Still, it was mighty tempting, and he might get lucky and fetch them both. He was trying to remember the boy’s name when he heard the voices coming from the direction of the railroad cut.
Stutts’ horse, who had never had a name, was restless too. He did not like being tied in the woods. In fact, he did not like anything much; the years with Wall Stutts had brought him little joy, and taught him to hate anything that walked on two legs. His reputation as a biter was well known among the men who associated with Stutts, and to walk behind him was to invite a crippling, as several had discovered too late. He had even bitten Stutts himself once. In return, Stutts had wired his jaws shut, hobbled him, and beat him to his knees with an axe handle. So he tolerated Wall Stutts, but watched him, waiting.
The voices, the smell of strangers from the place where the sun was going down, the sense that something was about to happen—these things bothered the old horse now, but not nearly so much as the other thing. He turned his head, watching the trees where it was coming. He stamped, and blew through his nose.
Stutts was hunkered down in the brush, eyeing the pair coming from the railroad. The boy wasn’t there, but the nigger was, and the old fool they called Hundred-and-Eleven. Where did he come from? They were talking loud, laughing, the old man cutting capers with his umbrella. Stutts wanted to spit out his chaw, but he was afraid the smell of it would carry. Behind him, the horse moved again.
WHEN THE COLONEL had gone, Solomon Gault reflected that the only god on the old Wagner place was Solomon Gault himself. The thought swelled within him, seemed to lift his feet off the ground and propel him into lightness and air. He had known the sensation before, when he watched men beg for their lives as Landers had done, crying out, not to God, but to Solomon Gault to deliver them. Yet, until today, he had never granted deliverance and so had not known the true nature of the power he embraced. At the last moment, and without knowing why, he had granted the Colonel life, had stayed his hand. Now he understood that, at the instant of decision, he had taken a lien on the Colonel’s soul. And the man had never known, had mounted and bid good evening and ridden away never knowing how close he had come.
The clearing was all in shadow now, and a few early cicadas were tuning up in the trees. Solomon Gault gathered up his spectacles and the leaves of his manuscript and returned them to his saddlebag. He was momentarily puzzled at the sight of his empty rifle scabbard, then remembered where the Henry had gone. Gault wondered if it had been used yet. Somehow he knew it had, and at this very moment something was happening that would shape his own destiny. Again he felt the rush of heat in his veins, the power of holding a life—how many lives?—in the balance of his will. It was Sunday now, he thought; how appropriate if he could strike on the Sabbath. But it was too long, seven days and nights. The enemy was strong now, alert, watching for something to happen, wondering where the next blow would fall. Gault smiled at the irony, at the thing he had created. In their strength, the enemy was at their weakest. In the pride of their strength, they would not believe, could not believe, that the very thing they were watching for would actually come at them out of the smoke. Gault looked toward the sky, still blue above the trees, though soon it would soften to pink and violet. Night would come, as it always did, and then tomorrow. Gault looked around at the clearing, the meeting place. This time tomorrow, then. He mounted and pushed the horse through the trees. Once on the road, he set off southward at a gallop.
Meanwhile, Colonel Burduck, unaware that he no longer possessed his soul, rode north toward the square. He let the horse walk at her own pace through the cool shadows, through the voices of the woods and ditches, through the drowsy calm of a summer evening. Burduck was deeply sensible of the peace around him, the more so because it seemed so distant, as though he and Sally moved in a bubble of time and space all their own. For a moment, the Colonel wondered if he’d been out of time again—but no, the memory was too clear, too immediate: the stranger in the clearing, the talk that led nowhere, the irritation that was still with him. He had come looking for something and had not been allowed to find it, and the knowledge rankled him.
The man Gault stuck in his mind like a splinter. How many like him were in the country around—how many in the South? Cool men who looked on their defeat as they might some obscure event in classical history, something to be regarded with the intellect alone and thus unreal, abstract, offering lessons that no longer applied. Such men were more dangerous than all the ragged multitude with real wounds in their hearts, who had bled and suffered and wished to bleed no more.
Sally didn’t want to cross the Leaf River bridge. Burduck spoke to her, nudged her with his blunt cavalry spurs, until at last she set her hooves on the planking. Once across, he took her
in hand again and set her at a canter, and the breeze was cool in his face and brought the smell of greening trees and dampness—and smoke. Burduck frowned at that. It wasn’t wood smoke, but the smell of a burning building, a foul, invasive smell that Burduck knew all too well. “Come up, Sally,” he said, and slapped the spurs to her. She leapt forward, tossing her head, then stretched out her neck and let go, the mud flying in chunks from her hooves, her breath huffing in time with her stride.
So much for peace. So much for eluding the bitter anger that set ships afire, that left men drowning in their own blood in the dark. Ride then, and ride quick, into the black tunnel of the next minute, with its news of folly and madness and its record of despair. It didn’t have to be this way, thought Burduck—I could have told them, if they’d listen, but they wouldn’t, and neither would we—
He passed the gloomy ruins of a house to the left—the Walker place, old Boswell had said—and topped the little rise, and there was the smoke rolling in a black plume toward the sky, and men with their carbines drawn, sitting horseback in the road. One of them trotted out to meet him—a corporal, the yellow chevrons bright and new on his blouse, his chinstrap fastened, his shape bulging with carbine sling and saber and rolled blanket and picket pins and ration bags and pistol. Burduck pulled Sally down on her haunches and took secret pleasure at the surprise in the man’s face as he saw the shoulder straps. “What the hell is all this?” snarled Colonel Burduck. “Who set this fire?”
“Lieutenant von Arnim,” said the man. “He—”
But Burduck was already pushing past him, down the road, past the immense negro woman wailing in the yard, past the Citadel of Djibouti that was now a glowing framework of charred timbers, toward the knot of men struggling through the mud, their muskets slung across their backs, the blanket they carried weighed down with a burden too heavy for anything but simple physical strength to bear.
AS HE PUSHED through the underbrush (the wet leaves made a silent passage, thank God), Gawain Harper unaccountably thought of Morgan and what she would say when she learned that Old Hundred-and-Eleven was sweet on her. She would not laugh, not Morgan. It would sadden her, and she would try to make it right somehow, worrying until she did. Gawain loved her for that—for something that hadn’t even happened yet. He wished he had gone to see her today, and maybe he wouldn’t be creeping through the woods, his mouth dry, his heart pounding in his chest, the pistol heavy in his hand. Right now they could be sitting on the garden bench in the scent of wisteria and sweet-shrub, and he would tell her how pretty she was, and how he wouldn’t let her go to Brazil nor even to Yalobusha County—
I won’t have it, won’t let you get away again! he would say, rising from the bench and planting his feet firmly on the overgrown bricks of the walk.
Oh, Gawain, how long have I waited! she would say, and rise, and throw herself into his arms—
But, no, here he was on the scout, and all because he had been beguiled by pride again, and old Priam had found him and brought the news that some peckerwood was lurking in the bushes with a rifle, and he, Gawain, with nothing but a pistol he had never fired.
He passed under a cedar tree and brushed against a glop of orange fungus such as cedars sported in summer. He could hear Uncle Priam and Old Hundred-and-Eleven carrying on like a couple of drunks in the broomsage field, just as they had planned, and he hoped the boy had stayed down in the cut like he told him to. Then, suddenly, he was looking at a horse; the animal was rolling its eyes at him and tugging at its tether, and the sight of him snapped Gawain back to the moment at hand, which included a strange man crouched in the brush with a rifle across his knees. Gawain swung wide around the horse, keeping his eyes on the man’s back, and in an instant the man was a stranger no longer but one whom he knew well. What was about to happen burst full upon him, as clear and complete as a memory he had gathered only yesterday.
AGAIN, AS AT morning, the upstairs hall of the Carter house was diffused with a light that seemed to grow from the plaster itself, as if behind the walls were a lamp that time turned up or down in its passing. The light belonged to time, Morgan thought. It had always been here, unchanging as the air that held it, and, if a person might only suspend for a moment the tyranny of the present, he might see in the light and air other shapes that dwelt there: a man and woman dancing, a figure risen from sleep to pace in the moonlight, a schoolboy standing on the gallery, watching the yard as though he might actually see the dreams he carried in his head.
She stood just inside the door to the Carter boy’s room. The light in there was different, painted by the evening sun that streamed through the oaks outside. Still, in the composition of melancholy sunlight and moving leaf shadow, and in the sounds through the open window—cicadas, a mockingbird, somewhere a calf bawling—Morgan could read the signature of time. She understood that this moment, too, was already being absorbed into the memory of the old house, to be awakened some time in its dreams and perceived by other watchers perhaps, who would feel a shudder they could not explain, then turn gratefully into life again.
The visitors had gathered in the upper hall for reasons Morgan neither understood nor questioned. Her father had not wanted her to stay, but she insisted. The men seemed angry, more at themselves than anything outside, and scared, too: scared of something beyond whatever it was they had done. Captain Stribling had gone to hide his horse in the shed; when he returned, the men grew silent and looked to him.
“Boys, we are in a tight place,” Stribling said.
“You don’t know the half of it, sir,” said Carl Nobles.
The man they called Thomas stood up then and waved his hand. “Tell em,” he said. “Go on, tell em.”
When Nobles began to speak, he evoked for them a dark landscape of vanity and menace, illuminated by a single name: Gault. Nobles told it without apology, a simple story, predictable even. It began when he arrived in Cumberland on the last day of May, under a noon sun that sent worms of sweat crawling under his clothes. He stood in the churned mud between the shell of Jenkins Hardware and the Old State Bank, smelling the reek of wet ashes, and realized for the first time that, in the two months since he had escaped the Federal encirclement at Hatcher’s Run, Carl Nobles, like many another, had sustained himself with the belief that the wastelands through which he passed had no application to him—that if he could just reach home, he would find it magically unchanged, the same people walking about the streets, the ground ready for the plow, mail waiting for him at the post office. And not only that, but he had expected to find himself there, perhaps lounging on the gallery of Frye’s Tavern or on a courthouse bench, and whatever he had become would be gathered at once into that which he had been before, and the memories he carried now would vanish forever. The scope of his delusion struck him like a physical blow, and he staggered to the side of the road and sat down among the ashes and wept without shame.
Gault found him a few days later at the Citadel of Djibouti. Nobles had never cared for the planter, but the man had a design, and Nobles grasped at it.
“It was supposed to be a stand-up fight,” Nobles said. “Some boys in Marshall County were to strike the Federal depot up there, burn supplies, make noise generally so as to draw the yankees off. Gault figured he could have a hundred fifty, two hundred rifles from the county, and we’d strike hard, take the artillery first. Then—”
“And then,” Thomas said, rising to his feet, his voice ringing in the hall, “the cavalry routed, the guns captured and turned on the dazed and bleeding foe, a moment when all hangs in the balance, the brave rebels standing alone on the brink of destiny. And then, at the last possible moment, out of Yalobusha comes the promised two hundred, three hundred embattled farmers to swell the ranks—the electrifying news spreads over the countryside like a brush fire to every hamlet and town—loyal men flock to the colors, and behold! The Rebellion renewed! The oppressor at bay! And we—” He stopped, waved his hand. “And you, I mean, get to do the whole thing over again, and
maybe even do it right this time.”
“That was the design?” said Bloodworth. “Jesus, Carl, why’d you buy such a broke-down horse as that?”
“But then he couldn’t wait, and sent Stutts to murder the boy,” said Stribling. “And the man today—that is part of it, too, ain’t it?”
“Not the part I signed up for,” said Nobles. “But, yes—the sergeant knew what got him—a Henry rifle, like the one Gault carries. It’s a wonder he didn’t drill Mister Wooster here while he was at it.”
“Only it wasn’t Gault this time either,” said Stribling. “It was Wall Stutts again.”
“I expect you can skate on that ice,” said Nobles. “Gault wouldn’t do the thing himself.”
“But why?” asked Craddock. “Why stir em up, for God’s sake?” Thomas snorted. “Because he wants em that way. It’ll look better in his memoirs. But look here, Stribling—how do you know it was Stutts?”
“Molochi Fish saw him kill the boy,” said Stribling.
“Molochi Fish?” said Craddock. “He is your witness?”
“It was supposed to be a stand-up fight,” Nobles insisted. “But the boy was too many for me, even without that fellow today.” He moved to the gallery and leaned on the doorframe; in the evening light, his face was the color of rust on an apple. “Now look at us,” he said. “Mister Bloodworth, to answer your question, I was a goddamned fool—beg pardon, Miss Rhea. I can’t put any other light on it.”
Bloodworth rubbed the back of his neck. “My God,” he said. “I dream of dead men every night.”
“Who don’t?” said Craddock.
“WELL, I’LL BE damned,” said Wall Stutts. “You just the feller I was lookin for.” He had risen and turned all in one movement, and found Gawain watching him a half dozen paces away. He grinned and straightened slowly, the rifle across his chest. “Aye God, you look just the same as you ever did.”
The Year of Jubilo Page 31