Four Spirits

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  ALL THE STREETS WERE choked with snow. A few adults were out in the wee hours on their lawns, building snowmen. Now, we’re safe, she thought. But they were tense. They drove for blocks, clenching themselves, not talking.

  “I’m not a believer anymore,” she said suddenly. “Not the way I was.” She remembered Darl’s defiant angel in Oak Hill Cemetery.

  “And you’re okay with that?”

  “I’ve evolved. It’s been as natural as that.”

  “You know I don’t care. Evolve again, if you want to.”

  “What’s happening here in the South. King’s courage. Shuttlesworth’s. This rising of the South, it’s a Christian movement. Oh, I know, plenty of Eastern intellectuals down here. You guys. Maybe some Buddhists, for all I know. Gandhi was a Hindu, and he’s the fountainhead of all of it; he’s immensely important to King. But the rise of the Negro in the South is really a Christian story. It has to be told that way.”

  “Oh, no,” he said.

  “What?”

  “That car, it’s with us again.”

  “Kiss!” she said. “Kiss and step on the gas.”

  Quickly she leaned to him, brushed his lips with hers, and the Thunderbird shot forward. They raced toward Norwood, straight out raced down Eighth Avenue.

  “Maybe the police will follow,” she said. “Faster.” The speedometer rose, forty, fifty, sixty. “Can you see them?” A wake of snow spewed out behind them.

  “No.”

  So they were safe again, not far from home. She wanted not to go home, though, but to sit in a private place and talk and talk. It was only just past midnight. Aunt Krit wouldn’t be expecting her so soon. She wondered about Jonathan’s sadness at the party.

  “Turn,” she said. “Then turn into the cemetery. It’ll be beautiful.”

  This evening no chain stretched across the columns marking the entrance.

  “ ‘Abandon hope,’ ” Jonathan murmured, “ ‘all ye who enter here.’ ” But he smiled, mocking his former mood. “I can barely see where the road is,” he added as they rolled between the stone pillars.

  “Keep moving. I want to go deep in.”

  He killed the headlights. “It’s so bright,” he said, “with just the snow reflection.”

  “Go deeper,” she said, and he did till they were almost hidden among the snow-shaggy evergreens, the magnolias and snow-bent cedars. The bare limbs of the oaks and elms were shelves for snow. The car crept slowly through acres of monuments and trees.

  Finally she felt concealed in the deep folds of the cemetery. Because of the hills, they could see nothing of the streets. He slowed the car, and they could hear the solitary slush and creak of the tires through the snow.

  “Turn off the engine,” she said, and he did.

  They coasted to a quiet stop, like a boat coming to a dock. Falling snow curtained the landscape.

  “Listen,” he said. He rolled down his window a little, and she did, too. “We could be in another country.” Bits of snow drifted through the open space at the top of the window.

  “What lovely silence,” she said. “So much peace here.”

  He waited, listening, and then he said, “Yes.”

  “I wish Cat were buried here.” Cat’s grave was in the country near a sunny meadow. “No, I don’t,” she amended. Don had said when they were kids, he and Cat used to run in the meadow behind the church, before Cat got sick.

  “Just listen,” Jonathan said, “and look.”

  So she did, wondering at the hush and beauty of the snow as it shrouded shrubs, monuments, and trees. Gradually, the racing of her heart was slowing down. Again, she remembered the little wax tree Aunt Krit had given her, bedecked with snow, and when she’d won a grade school contest reciting poetry, a pearly bracelet with a large charm—a basket full of jewels. Those lovely gifts had been comforting.

  “Do you mind Christmas carols?” she asked. She watched the snow melt as it hit the warm red hood of the car.

  He laughed. “No, of course not, but I thought you were skeptical.”

  “I love Christmas carols anyway.” Then she sang to him:

  In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan.

  Earth stood hard as i-ron, water like a stone.

  Snow had fallen, snow on snow. Snow on snow,

  In the bleak midwinter, long ago.

  “That was lovely, Stella,” he said.

  She smiled; yes, to create loveliness—that was the only answer. Not her singing but the beautiful words to the carol. “Careful, or I’ll convert you,” she said. The cold air nipped her nose.

  “Look,” he said. “There’s a rabbit.”

  And there was a little brown rabbit creeping across the crust of snow. He turned and showed them just his cottontail, almost indistinguishable against the white. Snow fell steadily.

  “It’s a Christina Rossetti poem,” she said.

  “Whose tune?” He rubbed his hands together briskly to warm them.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Such a measured, mournful melody,” he mused. “Very beautiful. Do you want to get out? Walk around.”

  “No. I feel safer in here. Warmer, too.” She rolled her window back up. “It’s snowing harder now. Feel my nose,” she said, and he did. Then she felt his. Her fingertips loved the fine cartilage of his nose. “Mine’s colder,” she said. The snow was starting to accumulate and hide the red of the hood. “The crimson and the white.” S he thought of the alma mater of Phillips High School, how those closing words always moved her; she missed Cat again and other classmates, and wondered where they were and what they were doing.

  “Sing the rest of the carol,” he asked quietly, and she did, what she could remember:

  An-gels and arch-angels may have gather-ed there,

  Cher-u-bim and ser-a-phim throng-ed the air;

  But His moth-er on-ly, in her maid-en bliss,

  Wor-shiped the Be-lov-ed with a kiss.

  Looking across the car seat, hearing how the song had bent its meaning when she sang it to him, she wanted to lean through the frigid air and kiss him. Behind his face, fern-shaped frost patterned the window. Surely she knew now what it was to adore another person. This man. This brilliant musician, who didn’t mind her singing. Who had made a pilgrimage south. For no one in particular. For everyone. Because Eagle Scouts had shot a boy off his bicycle.

  Not just the frost but the driving snow was erasing the world. Downward pelting snow, thicker than angel wings thronged the air. But she wouldn’t kiss yet; she would sing the next part to him. What, after all, did she have to give him? Maybe then.

  What can I give Him, poor as I am?

  If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb;

  If I were a wise man, I would do my part;

  Yet what I can I give Him—give Him my heart.

  Then they heard the sound of a car motor.

  “Rub the frost off,” he said. With the palms of their hands, they circled the frost off the glass. Through the peepholes, they both saw the shape of the green car, blurred to whiteness now, preceded by twin cones of light from its headlamps.

  “This was a mistake,” she said.

  “Don’t say that,” he answered with a quick glance at her. “It wasn’t a mistake”—his voice as gentle as though they had seen nothing. With the softness of his tone and gaze, he seemed to offer her a gentle animal, something softly alive and vulnerable—a rabbit, a lamb.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m really sorry.”

  The green car wasn’t racing anymore. It was coming slowly into the cemetery, pale lime green again, humped, on the one-lane road. Its headlights tunneled through the falling snow.

  “They haven’t seen us,” she said. “They’d be coming faster if they had. We’re camouflaged by the snow.”

  “Can you run?” His question was sharply urgent, full of energy.

  “Like a deer.”

  They swung open the doors, closed them quietly, clasped hands, and ran cross-country.
Dodging around the monuments, she slipped, and he held her hand tighter, to the point of pain. Just before they rounded a shielding spruce, Stella glanced back. Down through their headlights cascaded showers of snow.

  From the other side of the spruce, they heard a shot split the air, and the sound of glass breaking.

  “They’re shooting your car,” she whispered.

  “Our car,” he said, and she felt married to him. “Just run!”

  “This way,” she told him.

  Glancing back, she saw the snowfall was quickly filling their footprints, and she began to hope.

  “You go left, I’ll go right,” she said. “Meet you beyond the thicket of obelisks. See where the angel is?”Darl’s defiant angel.

  “Yes,” Jonathan said.

  They parted and ran. Stella heard many guns fired at the car. Tires exploded—one, two, three, four—with each explosion, she increased her speed. The men would cautiously approach the car; they would hope to find two bodies slumped onto the floorboards. She made herself run harder; she leapt the low tombstones in her path. The men would crane their necks to look through the shattered windshield. When they saw the car was empty, they would howl and curse, but she loved and would love the strength in her legs and her own running, alone, at top speed over the snow. The cold air refreshed her cheeks. She was weightless and indefatigable. I will live!

  The men would stand around and talk. Somebody would notice the footprints.

  Snow! Snow harder! she implored the heavens. Faster, she implored her legs. As she ran, she lifted her arms in a V above her head. Here the ghost comes, boo-hoo-hoo—her blood zinged in her body. Maybe snow already had filled the footprints. Don’t be frightened, boo-hoo-hoo! Jonathan was almost a speck, a dark, vertical dash, running parallel to her in the distance. She ran almost as fast. The past comes to help us.

  Behind the angel they ran into each other’s arms; Jonathan seemed star-tlingly large and human. She, too, panting, seemed large and fleshy, full of breath and heaving.

  Snow fell thickly between their flushed faces. “Quick,” she said. “I know where we can hide.” She remembered the perfect magnolia where the lone Negro hid, and the rocky draw that lead to it. Surely the rapidly falling snow would cover their tracks. Almost. She surveyed the vague landscape till she saw a rounded dome, like the top of a giant gumdrop.

  “Dry creek bed,” she gasped. “No footprints.”

  She could see fear in his eyes, but he nodded assent.

  “I’ve been here before,” she assured.

  They skittered down the draw. Bits of snow were caught in the grooves where water had scored the rock, but not enough snow for feet to imprint. Soon the steep dry course leveled out, and they passed through the colonnade of sycamores. She glanced up at the branches against the pale sky. But there, where the ground began to slope away to the open meadow, was the magnolia cloaked in white. Beyond the tree, unbroken snow covered the grass, but here, with one long step directly from the rocks underfoot into the tree branches, they entered obscurity.

  She passed into the tree as though going through a door into a hut. She entered the tree as though entering a story, a crevice in a fairy-tale book. He followed.

  She recalled that summer night when a dark figure had tucked himself under the low-hanging branches and disappeared. Snowcapped now, the leaves seemed to hide them with scoops of Agnes’s snow ice cream. What had that summer fugitive thought of Darl and her, as surprising as ghosts?White folks, lying on the ground! They’d kept his secret;he’d taught her how to hide.

  Within the tree, she and Jonathan wove their bodies between the thick branches so that they could stand upright. Their cold feet moved among old leaves, brown and brittle, and they stepped on rotting magnolia cones like honeycombs. Perhaps a few bright red seeds were still hidden in the spongy folds of the cones. The musty odor of magnolia rose from the debris.

  “We can climb up,” she whispered.

  He glanced up. “It’s made for climbing.” He almost smiled at her.

  “Yes, but it’s weak wood. Brittle. We can’t both be on the same limb, even a big one.”

  The magnolia was easy to climb, but they ascended as slowly as sloths. Their bare, cold fingers hooked over each limb so carefully that no snow shattered from the outer leaves. Inside the canopy of leaves, the air was still, but occasionally a view opened to the outside. When they climbed into the dome of the tree, higher than the road, they could peep out and see the vast snow-field studded with monuments.

  In the distance the four male figures stood with the two cars. Their car was parked twenty or thirty yards from the mutilated Thunderbird. Because the men now concealed their bodies in white robes, only their movement distinguished them from the landscape. Stella thought how the Finnish army, on skis and dressed in white, had surprised the Germans. One of the Klan members lifted his arm repeatedly, driving a knife into the canvas top of the car.

  “Insane,” Jonathan said. “They look like demented witches.”

  “Haints,” she corrected, but the pointed hoods were witchlike. She marveled at how the forms of the men blended with the fallen snow.

  One pointed hood circled the Thunderbird. He stopped beside the driver’s door as though to study the ground. “Hunters in the Snow,” Stella said, more to herself than Jonathan, but he answered with the painter’s name in a whisper, “Brueghel.” She took off her red woolen scarf, wadded it up, and concealed it like a nest in a crotch of the tree. The tracker moved to the front of the car, put his hands on his hips, paused to gaze down the road and around the car. The snow was falling less furiously, and the view began to clear. Still Stella felt safe within the snowcapped dome of the tree.

  Another man stood behind the Thunderbird, aiming his rifle at the license plate. He shouted—the cry was thin—and motioned with one hand for his buddies to stand back. The tracker obeyed. As soon as the shot was fired, a whoosh of flame enveloped the Thunderbird.

  “Better it than us,” Jonathan murmured.

  The four men retreated from the blaze. A pillar of black smoke rose up. They backed toward their own car, disrobing, ready to leave.

  When they grasped the tapered hoods and pulled, they revealed ordinary heads. One was almost bald. A heavy, short man. A tall one with a sloping head. Ordinary enough men. Their robes were rosy in the reflected light of the burning car. Each of the men walked backward, as though mesmerized by the majesty of destruction. Suddenly Stella realized the car might explode. “Watch out,” she heard herself say, in a normal voice. Jonathan reached past the tree trunk to touch her lips. He gently pressed them together.

  The four Klansmen took off their robes and carefully folded them, glancing from time to time at the fiery car. It burned like a chariot from hell. The men opened the trunk of their car and placed the folded cloth inside. They seemed naked in their jeans and long-sleeved shirts. They hadn’t worn coats under their robes. One of them held his rifle at arm’s length and shot into the sky. He continued to hold out his rifle as the shot echoed through the cemetery.

  Finally, he pitched the rifle into the trunk and closed the lid. In unison, the men opened the four doors and disappeared into the humped car.

  Jonathan put his cold hand on top of hers. She shuddered. They were like two cold buzzards sitting in the tree.

  The Klan’s car engine sputtered but started, began to back down the one-lane road. Then the driver swung the rear of the car off the road, trying to turn around. Spinning helplessly, the tires became stuck in the snow, and three of the men got out in their shirtsleeves to push. Among the snowy leaves, Jonathan and Stella sat perfectly still, perfectly patient. At last, the car was turned around; again the three men disappeared inside it, and the car crept back toward the gate, retracing its faint tire marks. For a while, Stella and Jonathan could see the glow of the car headlights moving through the snow. Then they vanished.

  “Let’s go,” Jonathan said.

  Slowly, stiff with cold, they climbed down.
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  “We were lucky,” Stella said when they stood on the ground beside the tree.

  “They didn’t even try to track us,” he replied.

  She thought otherwise but said nothing. Stella felt great blocks of sadness inside her shifting and settling. “We’re alive,” she almost whispered. Her throat was sore, numb with tension. The snowfall was subsiding.

  They seemed afraid to touch each other.

  “Follow the rocks?” he asked.

  “No. It’s quicker to cut across.” She led the way across the grass. It didn’t matter if they left footprints. “We’re headed toward the wall,” she said.

  She must put one foot in front of the other. She remembered how: numb, you walk away from fear. And why had she come back to this land of monuments and giant trees? Turn into the cemetery. She should apologize again. I’m sorry, she had said. Don’t say that, he had replied in his gentle voice. She watched her shoes and his sinking into snow, now deep enough to chill their ankle bones through thin socks. She thought of her scarf left behind, high in the crotch of the gumdrop magnolia, a bright red nest.

  They walked soberly and separately past the dead. Then one or the other of them, she would never remember which one, tentatively reached out to the other. With the exchange of a glance, they walked faster, as though they had someplace to go and the will to get there. The snow surrounded them in crystalline brilliance and the trees with snow-shagged mystery. They began to run. Suddenly exuberant, they gave all their bodies to running. Then she let go of his hand and by herself, in sheer joy, leapt a snow-decked monument.

  When she rejoined him, they ran together, stride by stride, till they gained the perimeter. They pushed through the prickly holly-tree hedge and scrambled over the snowcapped stonewall. Holding hands, they walked soberly, casually, on the sidewalk between the wall and the street with its ordinary cars moving cautiously over the hard-packed snow.

  DEEP IN THE NIGHT (“Aunt Krit, I’m spending the night with Ellie whose husband is out of town”), she dreams it differently:

  A dozen Klansmen pursue her through the snow-choked graves; they grab her wrists and she sinks on her knees into the snow. Like white wolves, they encircle her in their robes and one comes forward and speaks in a voice gray as gravel: “I’m gonna whup her.” In her nightmare, Jonathan lies behind her on his side in the snow, a slow red worm emerging from his nostril. She watches their hands hanging out of the white robes—ordinary hands? One wears a wedding ring;one has a small Band-Aid tenting his knuckle. She feels the cold metal of a pistol placed on the bulge behind her ear, and another cold barrel shoves against her breastbone. Aye, yi, yi, yi, yih.