Deep Cuts

by Angel Leigh McCoy

  ◙◙◙

  Awaiting the Captain's Ghost

  Michael Haynes

  Lillian prayed that the men trudging down the path from the main road to her home were beggars or deserters or simply lost. Three men coming together to her home on an errand was too frightful to consider.

  She bustled away from the front of the house. If they knocked, she would come to the door but she would not stand and wait. Upstairs she went, to Alice’s room. She had boxed up most everything from here already. The rag doll Alice had loved sat on top of the dresser, orphaned. Lillian hadn’t been able to bear consigning it to the cellar. She pulled the sheets from the crib. Little flecks stained them, and Lillian suddenly wished she were anywhere but here.

  From below, a heavy pounding on the front door. She dropped the sheets and closed her eyes, a distant wailing growing in her mind, until the knocking was repeated.

  The three men stood there when she swung the door open. They wore ragged clothes, and one of them went shoeless. Clots of dried blood stood out from the grime coating his feet.

  “Yes, gentlemen?”

  None of the men spoke immediately. The April afternoon sun was well past its peak, already half-hidden behind the magnolias. The air was painfully still and quiet.

  At last one of them, the one with a beard, said, “Mrs. Conner?”

  “Yes.”

  He swallowed. “Mrs. Jacob Conner?”

  Lillian’s vision swam. She reached for the door frame and focused on the eyes of the man who spoke. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I am Mrs. Jacob Conner.”

  He nodded. “I’m Sergeant Taylor, ma’am. John Taylor.” He broke their shared gaze, brought a hand to his head, and rubbed his hair. When he lowered his hand, he did not look straight into her eyes. “These are Lee Brooks and Martin Clay. We’ve come with word of Captain Conner.”

  Behind the men, cicadas began their chorus. The chattering sound grew louder, and a trickle of perspiration slid down Lillian’s back.

  “What word?” she asked, her tight throat allowing barely a whisper.

  “Mrs. Conner.” And then he looked at her eyes again. She almost begged him to look away. “I am sorry to have to inform you that Captain Jacob Conner was slain at Selma on the second of April.”

  The words hung in the air. When Lillian did not reply Taylor went on, haltingly. “The three of us served with Captain Conner, ma’am. I knew him a bit. He was a good man, and I am sorry for your loss.”

  Lillian licked her lips with a tongue so dry that it felt as if no moisture was imparted by the act. “You men must be exhausted.” The words felt distant, as if another person were speaking them. “May I offer you the hospitality of our home?”

  The two men—boys, really—behind Taylor glanced at each other, but he did not look back at them. “Yes, ma’am, thank you kindly.”

  She took her hand from the doorframe and though her legs felt weak, Lillian did not fall. “Come inside,” she told them, turning away.

  She left the men in the sitting room and went to fetch a bottle of brandy, the one they had saved for the day Jacob returned home. The cellar door was locked, and she retrieved the key from its peg. Her legs trembled when she stood at the top of the narrow stairs beyond the opened door. She kept her hands against the walls for support and counted the steps, the counting a focus to keep from fainting. Seven, eight, nine…

  The air down here was heavy and unmoving. She found the bottle, tucked off to one side among a few bottles of whiskey. Back up the stairs, counting again all the way. Eighteen, nineteen, twenty…The walls gave her body something to hold onto; the numbers did the same for her mind.

  Taylor cleared his throat as Lillian poured the strong drink. “Your husband and I spoke several times about your home.” She glanced up from her work. “I grew up here in Butler County and knew the road which runs along your land.”

  She carried glasses to him and one of his comrades. Taylor took a short swallow and nodded appreciatively. “Thank you.”

  Lillian listened to the still-heavy breathing of the men, the clank of glass on glass as she poured two more measures, the distant hum of cicadas. No breeze flowed through the room, and the house—even with four live souls in it—felt dead. The house that was to have been hers and Jacob’s…and their daughter’s.

  “Captain Conner had me swear once…” Taylor’s voice broke through her reflection. He paused and downed the rest of his drink. “He had me swear to be the one to bear you news if he were killed.”

  She looked at him. His face was flushed and sweat dripped down his temples, towards his cheeks. How many times Jacob had looked just that way, drenched in the Alabama heat. If it had been Jacob’s sweat she would have brushed it aside, caressed his skin. Kissed the spot and tasted the salt.

  Lillian saw that Taylor noticed her gaze and tore herself away.

  “More brandy?” she asked, reaching out with the glass she had poured for herself. He hesitated just a half second before taking it from her hand, his fingers brushing against hers along the curved glass. She turned quickly, heat rising up her own face.

  She took the bottle and added more to the other two men’s glasses and poured an inch for herself into the sergeant’s original glass.

  Lillian sat and looked across at them. She raised her glass. “To Jacob,” she said.

  They echoed her motion, her words. She took a long drink and closed her eyes as the warm liquid slid down her throat. When she opened her eyes few seconds later everything was the same, everything was still broken.

  She poured more brandy into her glass. “Selma, you said?”

  “Yes, ma’am. It was while we were retreating. The city was overrun by Wilson’s forces. We made the Alabama River at the southwest side of town. Jacob…Captain Conner…had us halfway across. A sharpshooter cut him down. Him and two others we were running with.”

  The crash of breaking glass intruded. One of the men behind Taylor had dropped his brandy, the one called Clay. Amber trickled across the floor.

  Clay’s hands were trembling, and he would not meet Lillian’s gaze. He bent his head and rested it in his hands. “He was helping me when he died, Mrs. Conner.” The words trickled past Clay’s fingers. “I’d lost my sense, was swimming all the wrong way. Captain Conner, he grabbed me. He was dragging me with him. There were shots. And then he didn’t have me no more.”

  Lillian bit her lip to hold in the curses coursing through her. The taste of blood seeped onto her tongue, and she downed the rest of her glass to chase it away. The brandy touched the wound on her lip, adding one more layer to her pain. Tears gathered in her eyes.

  “Excuse me, gentlemen.” She rose and turned away. Behind her, the men got to their feet as she made for the doorway.

  Lillian stood by the front window, breath ragged, memories and illusions and hopes for the future swirling through her. In the sky, clouds scudded in from the northwest, threatening to overrun the sun’s position.

  “Why, Jacob? We could have had another chance. I needed you.”

  Dust blew across the path the men had walked to her door, the path she had waited two years for her husband to return to her by. But he would never return, dead in a river miles from their home.

  Lillian shut her eyes and leaned against the window’s frame. The glass rattled softly with the oncoming breeze. Tastes of blood and brandy lingered on her tongue. Somewhere, not too far, not too close, a rumble of thunder rolled.

  Behind the thunder, another sound, a tune and words to go with it. There is a fashion in this land…The voice of her Aunt Caroline, singing, when Lillian had been young and Caroline had lived with her parents.

  A bitter laugh bubbled up her throat. “The knight’s ghost,” she whispered. Lillian hadn’t thought of the song for years, but she recalled every word: The young woman who went with her son down to the seashore to meet her husband back from the war. The men she brought home with her. The cellar.

  And—oh!—the young woman’s husband had
come back to her. He had returned, though just for one night. And she might forgive Jacob if just for one night. She would tell him about Alice, she would hear his voice and see his face and, if she could not touch him…if she could not touch him, then at least they would have that time together in spirit.

  Lillian opened her eyes and found the sky darkened by clouds, near the color of night. Her tongue found the injured spot on her lip and played with it.

  Her mind made up, she returned to the sitting room. Taylor was pouring the last of the brandy—Jacob’s brandy—into a glass held by Clay. And for a moment she doubted her senses, wondered if the shattered glass and the news that, but for these men’s actions, her husband might still be alive were all a dream of heat and misery. But, no. There on the floor, a faint stain and a glint or two from fragments of glass someone had failed to retrieve.

  “A storm is blowing in,” she told them. “And I fear it will be night once it has passed. Can I offer you men the honor of your Captain’s home for the evening? Or are you expected elsewhere tonight?”

  Taylor shrugged his shoulders. “Things are…rather dis-organized, ma’am.” He glanced back at the men. They gave no sign. “We welcome your invitation.”

  She smiled tentatively, as a young widow should. “If you all could help me in the cellar, we can have another bottle. I fear it won’t be as fine a drink as the last, but…”

  Taylor strode towards her. “I can help you, Mrs. Conner.”

  Lillian nodded slightly. “There are crates blocking the rack where the bottles are stored.” She smiled again, a touch more broadly. “There has not been anyone to partake of it here these past years, and I let other things pile up. We could make shorter work of the retrieval were you all to help me.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He gestured, and the other two stood.

  Down the steps in single file, the broad shoulders of Taylor nearly touching the walls on each side as he led the way.

  “D’you have a lantern?” he asked at the base of the steps.

  “I don’t,” Lillian said. “But with the door open, there’s light enough, once you let your eyes adjust. The rack is towards the rear.”

  She showed the men a pile of old crates sitting in front a set of shelves at the rear of the cellar. She moved two crates herself before letting her knees buckle and dropping a third to the ground.

  Brooks picked it up. “Might want to rest, ma’am,” he told her with a voice rough as tree bark.

  She went to the wall and put her back to it, feeling the chill of the cold earth. The three men continued to work. Soon the whole of the shelving, bare since the day Jacob had built it, would be visible. Slowly, Lillian worked her way back toward the stairs.

  One of the men, Brooks by the sound of him, cursed. “Ain’t nothin’ here,” he muttered.

  She hurried up the steps, fast as she could, hearing all three of their voices from behind. At the top, she threw the door shut and locked it. Moments later, the door shook as fists banged on it.

  “Mrs. Conner, what in the devil is going on?” called Taylor. The words, harsh though they might have been meant to be, were soft through the dense timber.

  She walked away, letting them curse, letting Taylor pound at the door. No two of them would be able to get side by side in those stairs. And if she thought rightly, none of them would be strong enough to break it down by themselves.

  The tune her aunt had sung returned to her again. “Take here the keys,” the ghost would say, “and ye’ll relieve my merry young men.” And that she would, if Jacob were to command her to do so. For the moment, the key went on a stand in a corner of the room.

  Outside, rain pattered against the walls of the house. Though it was but early evening, Lillian climbed the stairs. She passed by Alice’s room without a glance and went straight to the room she shared with Jacob. Up there, the noise from the cellar was only sporadically audible.

  Lillian left the door to their room open so as not to impede Jacob’s ghost. She took off the clothes she wore, layer by layer, and replaced them with only her one sheer nightgown, a gift from Jacob on their second anniversary. She lay down and tried not to think of anything. The alcohol made this easy, and before long, she was asleep.

  ◙

  No spirit arrived in the night.

  She woke once in the middle of the darkness to complete stillness. Only a few clouds remained to drift in the sky, and the moon’s light filtered in through magnolia leaves.

  “Jacob?” she called. But no one replied.

  She did not stir again until the sky was bright. Below, she heard sounds from the men in the cellar. There would be a loud bang, a pause of half a minute or so, and then another crash.

  Lillian dressed for the day and went to that door. One of them must have heard her approach.

  “Mrs. Conner.” It was Taylor who spoke, but his voice too was rough, as if he had been screaming in the night. “Mrs. Conner, I know you hear me. You need to be letting us out of here, ma’am. Someone will come if we stay missing.”

  “I pray he does,” she replied.

  “What’s that?” Taylor asked. “I couldn’t hear you.”

  She walked away, then, and went about the rest of her day, only occasionally wishing for a respite from the sounds of the men and their attempts to free themselves. The noise of shattering glass let her know they had found the whiskey.

  That evening, she left the house’s front door ajar an inch or two. She knew nothing of the habits of shades and wanted to make the path as easy as possible for her husband, for she was certain he would return to tell her to free his men. He would come, and she could let him know how their daughter had died late in March, the fever taking her after almost a week.

  She could not bear the thought of decades alone in this house. So she would ask if he could tell her future, like the knight’s ghost had. Would she marry another man and have children with him as the lady of the song had? If not…well, if not, then she might make her stay in this house shorter than God would have expected. There were ways of that.

  She wore the same nightgown as before, but tonight she foreswore the bed sheets, lying on top of them and letting the hot, heavy air be her covering.

  But again, no spirit arrived in the night and dawn came to Lillian with sadness and curses.

  There was no banging and crashing from the men in the cellar on this day, though they shared curses of their own. When they screamed, Lillian screamed back at them until her throat burned and her ears rang.

  “We have our own families!” one of them cried through the door. She couldn’t tell their voices apart any longer. Theirs and hers were a chorus of agony, drowning out the cicadas.

  “You’ll see them again! As soon as I’ve seen my Jacob. I swear you’ll see them again.” She sank to a chair and hugged her arms tightly around herself, cold despite the rising heat of the afternoon.

  Though she was cold in the day, fire burned within her at night, and when she went to bed, she left the nightgown where it lay. She tried to sleep but could not still her thoughts. Owls and other night creatures called outside, and the light of the full moon worked its way across her view of the sky. Even once the moon had passed beyond her window’s reach, she waited awake. She was there, still watching, when morning light blossomed in the sky.

  Three nights and no spirit had arrived.

  Lillian fell asleep then, as day passed, and she woke past mid-day with sweat on her bare skin.

  She bathed and dressed and wandered downstairs. There was silence beyond the door to the cellar.

  Had it all been for naught? She went to that door and stood by it.

  “Is that you, Mrs. Conner?” The voice was weak, that of a soldier left behind. Left to die. “Please, whoever is there. For the love of God, please open the door.”

  Lillian ran her hand across the door’s beams and considered retrieving its key, doing as this man asked, even if her husband had not come to her.

  She hummed a bit of the melody o
f her aunt’s song: They shot the shot, and drew the stroke and wade in red blood to the knee; no sailors more for their lord could do than my young men they did for me…

  Was this why Jacob had not come? Unlike the knight’s men, certainly her husband’s men could have done more. Not foundered in the river, forcing Jacob to give his life for theirs. Not left his body behind when maybe he could have been saved.

  Weak beating against the door. “Please,” said the voice.

  “No,” she said, so quiet that her voice could not have carried into the cellar. “Not today.”

  Though she had barely been awake, fatigue hung heavily over her through the next few hours. The occasional scratches and thumps at the cellar door drilled into her aching head.

  She went back to bed, not bothering to change out of the clothes she was wearing. She spread her arms across the bed and her legs, too, reaching out for all of its four corners, covering it.

  She drifted back into sleep while day was still light and awoke to howls outside and a dark sky.

  There, between her bed and the window, stood Taylor and Clay and Brooks. They looked at her with malevolent eyes. The pale moonlight shone through them.

  Lillian had just a moment to recognize them for what they were, and then, they were upon her. They made not a sound and neither did she.

  Hours later, when the dawn came, the room was empty, and the house, once full of life, was home to not a soul.