“I want you to know what I know now, where your heart goes when you’re lost in love, when you step off the grand precipice, knowing that somebody will catch you.”
Ash spoke softly, as well. “I’ve already known the only love I’ll ever know. You took him from me. I’ll never forgive you.”
“You’re only twenty-one. You look at your life now, and you see a desert because Gibby is leaving you. But even in the desert, there are hidden oases that offer comfort and ease, and one day soon, to your complete surprise, you’ll find yourself in one of those, and you will lie down in love and luxury.”
“I’ll never forgive you, Mother. And I’ll never forgive Gibby.”
Sometimes some things are enough, just as they are. She gently took off his shoes and socks. She rubbed his feet until he was asleep, and left him, making sure the nightlight was still on. She slipped out to her own bed, closing the door softly behind her.
At three thirty she woke up, listening for sounds of Gibby. Turning on the light, she found a small blue box on her bedside table. Inside it was a ring, a wide band of gold. She looked carefully, and inside the ring was engraved in tiny letters, “Gibby loves Diana forever. December 7, 1941.”
Without throwing on her robe, she jumped from her bed and ran to the door. Gibby was walking away from her.
“Gibby!” she called out. He didn’t turn. “Please!”
He turned, and walked back to her, and embraced her. At that moment, Ash’s door opened, and he looked directly into the hall. His anger was so fierce, so turbulent, he hung on to the door frame.
“I told you,” he said. “It’s not like I didn’t tell you. Step back, Mother. Step back now! I told you, Gibby. I shouted it with every look, every gesture. I love you. But you were blind to me. You never understood. You are the only one I ever loved. Ever will. Night after night, ten feet apart, listening to your breathing. So soft and quiet, all I wanted was to slip from my bed into yours, to hold you close to my chest, to my heart forever. You never understood. And now, you steal my mother from me.”
Ash suddenly pulled a small blue-black revolver from the pocket of his tweed jacket.
Diana shouted with alarm, “He was just saying good-bye, Ash. I swear that’s all it was.”
Ash shot Gibby twice—in the heart and in the face, destroying his beauty forever. The noise in the silent house was the death of time, the end of history.
Gibby collapsed like a rag doll, and Diana collapsed with him, his head in her lap, blood and bits of brain everywhere.
The whole world was screaming—Diana, Ash, and Rose, who had rushed from her room at the sound. The waters of the black river rose up in horror and slammed against the shore. Ash, screaming himself, fell to his knees and, almost as an afterthought, shot Rose straight in the heart, so that she screamed and stood where she was, surprised, spouting blood, until Ash shouted, “Shut up!” and shot her a second time, causing her to collapse into a puddle of black and red, her turban undone, her blue-black wisps of hair wrapping around her bald scalp, her witchlike fingers clutching her heart, her many rings glinting in the moonlight.
Diana screamed, “Ash, why? Why Rose?”
And he answered, calmly, coldly, in a daze, “She bothered me.”
And then the screaming stopped, and there was nothing but silence. Every room, every stairwell, was silent. The rocking chair stopped rocking. The clocks stopped ticking, time stopping forever at 4:07 a.m., December 7, 1941. And every portrait of all the men and women who had met and bred since 1607 in Virginia, in the house called Saratoga, looked down silently on complete emptiness.
32
SHE LOOKED UP to Ash, who was rocking back and forth on his heels, keening.
She crawled to him. “Ash,” she said, to no response.
She shook him until she got his attention. “Ash, listen to me. You didn’t have to do that. You didn’t. He had just come to say good-bye. Please, darling, listen to me. Just to say good-bye. Give me the gun, and listen to me. Can you listen to me?”
He nodded. His eyes were bloodshot.
“Can you drive? You’re in shock. But can you focus? Can you do that? Do you think you can get dressed and drive away from here?”
“Yes,” he whispered.
“Then pick up your luggage and go back to Richmond and wait. Just wait. Eventually the police will call. Wait for the call. You have been in Richmond for the last five days. Listen.” She shook him until he looked at her. “Do you understand me? Are you sure you can drive? You are not to die in a car crash, do you hear me?”
“Yes, Mama.” He couldn’t speak above a whisper.
“Ash, he was going into the army today. He just wanted to say good-bye. He kept his promise to you. We. We kept our promise. I want you to know that, we kept our promise.
“There’s something we have to do before you leave. We have to put their bodies back in their beds. It’s the least we can do. Can you help me do that? Are you all right?”
Stronger now, Ash nodded, and he and Diana picked up first Gibby, so heavy, and laid him in his bed, covering him with his covers. The bleeding had stopped now, and Diana washed what was left of his face with a warm cloth, realizing that, warm or cold, it made no difference now. She put a pillow under his head, from her childhood, stolen from a resort hotel where they used to spend three weeks every summer. It was small, what her mother called a baby pillow, and it was embroidered in baby-blue stitching with the hotel’s famous line: “Shhhh. . . . It’s sleepy time down South.” And there was an embroidered mammy, her finger to her lips, to watch over your dreams.
While she was doing that, almost a holy ritual, Ash picked up the practically weightless body of Rose and put her in her bed, covering her appalling nakedness first with her Chinese robe and then her elaborate silk bedcovers, sitting her up against her many pillows so that she could see the approaching dawn. What had he done? What, now, had he made of his life?
He stood at the doorway. “I’ve finished, Mama.”
She came to him and hugged him fiercely, his tears wetting her hair, running down her cheeks. Mingling with her own, salt on salt.
“Now get in your car and drive and don’t die. You may not see me for a long time. You might not see me ever. Do you understand how much I love you?”
He shook his head.
“Will you tell your children?”
Again he shook his head. “I’ll never have children, Mama. You know that.”
“Will you tell your lovers about the mother who once loved you so much she couldn’t look you in the face?”
“Yes, Mama.”
“Now go.”
He went into his bedroom to dress and emerged, carrying his overnight bag, white as a ghost, trembling.
As he turned onto the grand staircase, he paused for a minute and looked at her. “I love you, Mama. You were my only love until I met Gibby. You held me in your arms all those years. Thanks for dancing only for me.”
She didn’t move, but she smiled the dazzling smile that had first attracted his father. “I love you to the end of the world.” And she blew him a kiss, then closed the door of her room.
She picked up the box by her bed, and tried the ring inside on every finger. It didn’t fit.
It was the end. The future held no promise, the past no refuge. She was alone, but free at last. Free of family, of the obligation to carry on. She could nurture and indulge her grief forever.
She would obliterate everything—hope, her Christian faith, her ancient southern blood, this mausoleum of a house, prison of the goddamned South that had held her captive since birth, with its traditions, the guilt at the sight of generation after generation of black faces, the slavery, the genocide, the sting of the lash on a young girl’s back. Her lineage, her place in that long chain of guilt. She would break the chain, the shackles that bound them all to a time long past, the serene, evil faces in the portraits of her ancestors. And with it all, the vast bondage of possession, of things, the furniture, th
e Persian rugs, the china, the black faces that looked at her with mournful eyes through the tight noose of history, everything except her father’s wheelchair, which was already in her secret garden, her living grave.
She hoped she lived a long, long time, long enough to forget, to expiate her crimes, the crimes of all her family, brave on horseback, flying into war against the Union, their rage spurring the stallions on into the fray, all to protect a way of life built on an evil principle, riding, whip in hand, plumed hats on their heads, strolling down the long dusty road that divided the shacks in which they housed their property, muslin curtains lifting gracefully in the windows without glass, the dirt floors, the freezing winters, until they picked some pretty young girl and went in, the birth of more property, counting their worth in the number of people owned.
Virginia, her beloved country, had owned more slaves than any other state, and those people, their children’s children, still lived in bondage and fear, their every move watched, their moves dictated by the signs everywhere that read “White Only.”
This was the Day of the Dead, her lover dead, his beautiful body, his tongue in her mouth, his sex moving into her with such kindness she wept every time. All dead now, all gone forever. She was complicit in every death that washed over her like the waters of the Rappahannock River. There was no undoing it, no salvaging the tiniest piece of all she had ever known.
And she looked up at her familiar, countless rooms, the rooms of history, never to be seen again, and her heart burst open, just broke in a thousand pieces like a shattered teacup.
And she realized, deep in her broken heart and then washing over her entire body until her hands trembled, until her whole body turned to ice, the deep truth of this dreadful, murderous moment.
This was her Independence Day.
Rise up, the voices said in her heart. The voices of the ruddy-faced men hanging on the wall, and the prim, weary women. Exhausted from the endless lying-in, the endless births, sometimes seven before they were thirty and dead. Rise up, the sorrow and the glory, all over now. Rise up, the voices of the dead, the dead at Antietam and Gettysburg and Bull Run and the Wilderness of Virginia, the boys at New Market, rise up. Rise up, black woman, black man, rise into true freedom. Never again. Not no more. And teach, as Sojourner did, teach the hatred, the belittlement, teach your own inherent beauty, your own truth and music, not borrowed, not nobody else’s.
Rise up from the mahogany table and pull the damask tablecloth, pull down the crystal chandelier with all your might, until it all crashes to the floor, shatters in a billion pieces, the candles guttering out, the portraits staring down aghast.
Rise up, Diana, from love as you have known it. It poisons. It poisons everything. Rise up from your husband, who hated you. Rise up from the tenderness of your boy lover, the fluttering ribbon of your heart.
Rise, and run. Rise into the light.
Rise up, pretty girl with the pretty foot. You are all alone now. It no longer matters. Not one single thing is of value, on earth or in heaven. Rise up into the relief of hopelessness, of the certain knowledge that nobody will come, ever again. Nobody.
Independence Day. Take your chance, your only hope at love, at happiness, which consists of expecting no one and nothing, a century of curtsies and clothes now blowing into history and the grave like dust on a dirt road.
And rise she did. She kissed her lover, his blood staining her lips, and blindly, longingly, with hope of resurrection, she rose.
Rise up, O ye people. All ye people, rise up.
Rise.
33
SHE WAS IN the kitchen before Priscilla. “We were up awfully late,” she said to her, her voice just barely trembling. “I think there’s not going to be anybody at breakfast.”
“I thought I heard some noise. I said to Clarence, ‘Maybe I should go over there, just to see if anybody needs anything.’”
“You’re a sly one. You hate not knowing everything that’s going on. Actually, we were playing charades. Mr. Ashton has already gone back to Richmond. Mr. Gibby has left for the army—he had to be at the bus at four, so we all just decided to stay up until he had to leave. And Miss Rose is leaving today. I’ll take her to the train. Here’s two hundred dollars. I want you and Clarence to go into Richmond and stay in a grand hotel and have a grand dinner and come home rested and happy. After this, it’s just us again for a while. At least until Ash comes home.”
“Well, I don’t know . . .”
“Priscilla, did you ever even have a honeymoon?”
“Not really.”
“Well, now’s the time. Do what I tell you.”
Priscilla reluctantly put down the apron she was putting on. “When do we come back?”
“When your money’s all gone.”
“Lawd. That could be a whole month. Mebbe more.”
“Then that’s it. I’ll do for myself. I’ll eat down at Lowery’s in Tappahannock.”
“That new place? You know we don’t go to no restaurants.”
“Well. We will now. Go.” Diana couldn’t stand much more of this. She had to get them out of there, get on with it.
“Clarence just going to lose his mind.”
“Just come back in one piece.”
Priscilla bustled out the door, and half an hour later, the two of them could be seen loading up their old car, Priscilla in a hat that would have made Rose green with envy, and driving out the long drive.
Diana changed into a sober, proper dress, got into the Bentley, and drove carefully to Big Mike’s filling station. His father was called Little Mike, oddly, since he was half the size of his gargantuan son. She got three ten-gallon containers of gas. Even though each one weighed sixty pounds, Big Mike hefted them into the trunk as though they were nothing.
The total cost for the gas was $3.60. Annihilation costs so little. It’s really rather cheap to destroy everything forever.
As she drove home, her hands shook on the wheel, and she almost ran the car off the road several times. The fever was now so intense it glimmered behind her eyes, leaving little sparkles of fear and excitement. Did she have enough? She had to have enough. And how would she lift it? How would she carry sixty pounds up all those stairs?
She pulled to a reckless stop in the front of the house. The fever was now her heartbeat. It breathed in and out as she did. She had never felt so alive, so intent.
She opened the trunk, and there they were: three red metal containers containing the end of everything. The end of class and her place in it. The loosening of the shackles. The end of things.
She went upstairs, put on Rose’s most extravagant Chinese robe, and carefully wrapped a black turban around her hair. If anybody saw her, they would assume it was the mysterious stranger who had lived in the house for the last seven months, rarely seen but once seen, never forgotten. The whole town knew about her—the robes, the turbans, the jewels, the beak. That crazy woman—they’d heard the stories from the workers who ate in the diner. Unfair, but Diana couldn’t bear the responsibility. It must be somebody else who was doing this. Somebody far crueler than she could ever be.
She carefully pinned Rose’s sacred eye over her heart.
But the fever, the rage, was on her, and she could not be stopped. Southerners are born with a wistful longing to live in the past, to wrap themselves in it like a homespun garment and live there forever. There is also the constant and eternal desire to tear it apart, to cut the shackles of history and walk freely, to pull down the family portraits and cut out the faces. They see themselves as ghosts in glass dollhouses, pulling behind them the weight of every man and woman on the long chain behind them, the chain that reaches to the beginning of time. Too much. It is too much.
She went back down to the car and picked up the first of the three red containers. It was light as a feather. She carried it like the desperate woman who lifts the car off her child. Robe flowing behind her, she ran up the stairs and began to sprinkle gasoline everywhere. Going back down, s
he saw the Sargent they had overlooked, the one of her as a white muslin girl, and she tried to lift it off the wall, but it was secured strongly at all four corners. Her hands were shaking so badly, she couldn’t begin to figure out how to get it off the wall, so with enormous, heartrending regret, she left it where it was. Back at the car, she took another container and began to sprinkle it over the downstairs, and so on with the third. The smell was overwhelming and she almost fainted, but she went back up the stairs to grab her jewel case from the safe in her room and, almost as an afterthought, with sheer brute force, pulled the Sargent from the wall.
She stopped in Gibby’s room. He was cold and blue, which made his hair look even redder, and she had to force herself to remember that it was Ash, and not she, who had killed him, she felt so complicit in his death.
She whispered the poetry to him he had once whispered to her in the night, and then she kissed his cold blue lips, covered his face with the linen sheet, and left him to his fate at the hands of God.
She had never felt calmer, or more at peace, but also more in a rush. In the kitchen, she picked up a box of kitchen matches. She stood at the lintel of the dining room and lit one and threw it in. She had expected the fire to start slowly and build. Nothing prepared her for the instantaneous conflagration that was suddenly all around her, leaving her little room for exit. All over the house, upstairs and downstairs, balls of fire shot up throughout the house. The fire was so sudden and so violent it singed off her eyebrows, which would never grow back, giving her, for the rest of her life, a look of continual surprise. She barely made it out the back door, Sargent and jewels in hand, before the whole thing exploded.
She ran through the glimmering dawn to Little Saratoga, robe flying, and peered through the windows as the entire history of her august family burned. Port Royal had a volunteer fire department, a ragtag collection of six volunteers with one truck, and she could hear them approaching from the distance, but it was, in every way, too late. In the end eight volunteer fire squads arrived, each equally sincere and equally incompetent, and there was nothing to do but stand and watch as one of the greatest houses in America burned and burned and burned. The car exploded in a ball of flame, shooting fire twenty feet into the air. They tried to look for her, for Diana Cooke Copperton Cooke, but it was far too hot to enter the house. Every now and then, a ball of fire would go off and shoot into the sky, like a roman candle. One of these landed on the schooner, and it caught fire, and burned and sank, unsalvageable, beauty inseparable from fire and water, the brass trimmings on the boat melting with fire, curling into grotesque shapes, the sails themselves flying free with flame. The horses raced from the barn, panic-stricken, and out into the fields through the gate she had left open for them.
The Dying of the Light Page 23