by Richard Peck
In the moving picture memory makes, Great-uncle Noah is under the window of his wife’s room, weeding one-handed in the heat of the day. But that can’t be. The garden ran down from the far side of the house, and Uncle Noah would have been on the porch with his sister Tilly to greet us. He was certainly there on the day we left—only a little bent over, in his shirtsleeves, one of them pinned up above the missing arm.
In the first moments of our visit, even the little boys were all eyes. They’d been promised snakes around the woodshed and catfish they could catch themselves. They’d banked on shoeless days and bathless nights. But just for a moment they were caught in the grip of this place. They felt the weight of its history, and mystery.
So did I. The paper was loose and peeling on the walls. I wondered how many layers you’d have to scrape away until you came to the time when these old people were young. If they ever were.
I wondered how quiet you’d have to be to hear the voices of those times.
The House Astride the Devil’s Backbone
1861
Chapter Two
“Tilly!” Mama called out to me from the kitchen. “Go find Cass.”
The sun was winking away behind the big rock across the river. Tower Rock, standing high out of the water. A grove of trees grew over the top of it. Tower Rock rose on the other bank of the river and our Devil’s Backbone here on the Illinois side. A dangerous stretch of river ran between—our stretch of the river.
Even though Tower Rock was over in Missouri, with the river between us, it gave our town its name: Grand Tower. Nobody wanted to live in a town named after the devil.
It wasn’t any use to holler for Cass from the porch. Up in her private places on her hill, she was deaf unto the world. Cass was a terrible worry to Mama, and I thought anything that worried Mama ought to worry me.
As quick as the sun was down, a chill came off the water. It was the end of April with some spring showing, time for the river to stir itself. Word had reached us that the ice was breaking up below St. Paul and rotting above Dubuque. We’d had the packet boats down from Quincy and St. Louis. But we needed the Southern boats to keep us in business. And only days ago President Abe Lincoln had proclaimed a blockade on the Southern ports.
Last month when Lincoln was inaugurated as the President of the United States, we’d built bonfires down by the landing to celebrate—show him the way to Washington, as people said. Few were for him, of course. You had to set fire to the woods and sift the ashes to find a Republican around here. But Lincoln was an Illinois man, one of us.
Now we didn’t know what to think. The South was breaking away, and what did this blockade mean? If it meant shutting down the river traffic, it was serious. We heard Arkansas was ready to pull out of the Union, and St. Louis was in an uproar. So we saw trouble coming our way.
Cass had blazed the only paths there were to the crest of the hill. I made right for her. I always knew where to look for Cass. I just never knew what I’d find when I got there.
She was slumped on a flat rock we always called the devil’s footstool, just among ourselves. From here you looked down through the trees to the landing and across the river too. You could see forever from here, though what Cass saw didn’t bear thinking about.
She huddled in Mama’s old threadbare shawl. Her face was wet with tears, gray as the sundown river. She was only twelve and looked ten. She’d just about give up on school, the winter took so much out of her. And thin? Not much more than breath and britches. The wind went straight through her, though we were both still sewed into our winter underwear.
That’s the way we done in them days. You was sewed into your underwear in October and didn’t see yourself again till late spring. We thought if we got nekkid and washed ourselves in the wintertime, we’d catch a chill that would carry us off.
“Oh, Cassy, for pity’s sake,” I said, big-sistering her. I flung down on the devil’s footstool, and she let me hug her close. She looked up like she’d never laid eyes on me. Her eyes were too big for her face.
“Cassy, what now?”
“Dretful.” She tucked her face into my shoulder. “All the dead and the dying. You can smell their wounds from here.”
“Who this time?” I asked, but I didn’t want to know. “Is it the wedding party?”
I hoped not. The wedding party was Grand Tower’s oldest story. It went back to 1839, and people talked about it yet. It seemed there was a young couple who took a notion to get married across the river on top of Tower Rock. She was Miss Penelope Pike. He was John Randolph Davis, both of them shirttail kin to half the county. They set forth in an open boat with the bride’s parents and sister, the groom’s mother, and three slaves. The Reverend Josiah Maxwell went too, to tie the knot for them.
Well, they got married on the rock. Don’t ask how they got up to the top of the thing. That’s never part of the story. On their way back, their boat was caught crossways in the current and pulled down by a whirlpool. They disappeared without a trace, though a moment before they were visible from both shores. That was the story of the wedding party. The problem was that Cass often saw them.
From up here where she nested, she’d catch sight of them, pushing off in an old-timey boat. There’d be the bride, wearing her veil crowned with orange blossom. There’d be the groom behind her, splitting the seams on his best coat to help with the rowing. There they’d be in the bright morning of all their hopes. To hear her tell it, Cass saw them as clear as if she’d been one of the party.
It could get a lot worse than that. Cass had seen the wedding party return. She saw them after the whirlpool had drawn them down to the bottom of the river. Now they were pulling hard for this shore in their swamped boat, pulling and pulling and never making it. She saw them caked in silt, their hands tangled with weed. She saw their gray corpse faces eaten away by the fish. The bridal veil snagged in the bride’s skeleton shoulder. She saw their ghosts.
“No, Tilly.” Cass pulled back from me. “Not this time, though it was in April when they was drowned.” Her face was solemn and smudgy. Evening was drawing in on us, even here at the top of the Backbone.
“Was it the old Spaniards?” I said. “Or the Frenchies?” Many a time she’d seen them too. She said she had.
She’d seen the first explorers on this river, though they’d come two hundred years ago, maybe more. She could tell you everything about them, describe to you every chink in their queer foreign boats. She could smell the hogs the Spaniards brought to feed themselves.
She saw the Frenchmen coming down from the northern lakes in their pirogues. They were dressed in Chinese costume, for they were looking for China and expected it around every bend in the river. She could call these ancients by name, though she hadn’t learned them at school. She paid very little attention at school.
These old explorers were never just drifting peacefully past, not in Cass’s visions. She saw them caught in the quick drain of a whirlpool. She saw their sudden, swirling deaths far from home, all hands lost before they could know. She heard the hogs squealing their last.
Sometimes it was the Indians who died. Though they were wiser to the river than foreigners, the eddies between our rocks could claim them too. Their swift, slender canoes folded like paper. Hands upflung, they were swept in a circle out of sight. They were the Miamis, Cass said, though how could she know?
She sobbed in my arms till my shoulder was wet. She was worse this time. Was she getting worse? I looked away, down to the landing. It reached out in the water, lanterns lit to lead the boats that hadn’t come.
Mama feared that people were commencing to talk about Cass. She never told her visions outside the family. She said little or nothing in company. But people could see her up here, perched on the Devil’s Backbone. Before the trees greened, they could see her plain, staring out at the river like a soul in torment. They called her moony. Mama feared they’d one day call her mad.
Then what could be done about her?
; I’d have to get her home now, though she was blind with tears. “Cass, tell me who you see now. Who do you mourn? Who were the dead and the dying this time?”
She liked to work free of me, pulling away from her own visions. You could tell they were a knife to her heart. “All the boys,” she keened. “Just boys, blown apart, blue and gray.”
When she said they were blue and gray, I thought she meant their cold, drowned faces. Maybe I thought that.
“Too young,” she moaned. “Boats burdened with them, and blood in the water behind.”
She’d seen steamboats blow up too, many a time. But who hadn’t? The big steamboats blew up often enough, six or eight right near us that I could remember: the Ida May and the Little Jim Reese and the Belle of St. Louis among them. The boilers would cut loose and rip the rickety contraptions to splinters and smithereens. Bodies boiled alive would wash ashore for days after. But we’d all seen that.
“When did it happen, Cass?”
She looked at me with eyes more haunted than her heart. “It ain’t happened yet,” she said.
I went cold to my core. All her visions looked back, sometimes to ages past. Now she’d whipped around and was looking ahead. And that was the April when we all feared the future. It was the spring of 1861, when all the news was bad, promising worse.
She was limp as a rag. I gathered her up and dabbed at her eyes with the shawl. As we drew nigh the house, Noah, our brother, was climbing the hill, home for his supper.
Noah had grown tall as a stork, seemingly overnight. His knees were working through his britches, and his wrists grown out of his sleeves. He stalked up through the trees with Paw’s old fowling piece on his shoulder. The gun was older than the shoulder that bore it. The barrel was scabby with rust. But Noah had been marching and drilling with it.
A bunch of local boys met up after their work, pretending to soldier. You couldn’t get many boys to stick up for U. S. Grant and the North that April. Only the Henson boys and Gideon Hickman and Jack Popejoy. And Noah.
You could hear them from up here, barking out their raggedy commands: “Draw saber! By the right flank, quick trot, march!” Like they knew all about it. They marched with whatever they had—a squirrel rifle, a corn knife, a paling off the porch. They looped lariats at their sides, for leading home a reb prisoner-of-war.
Down the road by the old stone structure that served as schoolhouse, a bigger bunch of boys drilled. But they drilled for the South and Jeff Davis. Among them, the Cottrell brothers and Mose Thornton and Jaret Dalrymple. And Curry Marshall.
They’d divvied up, some for the North, more for the South. Why didn’t they just fight it out right here in the road, fair and square? Did they even know it could end with them killing one another in some godforsaken loblolly far from home? I couldn’t get my mind around it, and I’d always thought I understood Noah. We were twins, and I swore I could hear his heart beat.
Coming along behind me, Cass caught sight of him. She let out a startled cry, and I thought she’d bolt. Instead, she burst into fresh tears and heaved with sobs. Both hands covered her face. I had to lead her home.
Chapter Three
By the time Noah come in from the pump, we pretty nearly had supper on the table. Cass was good help if you could keep her mind on it. She could cook water-ground meal and make clabber milk and bone a mudfish as well as Mama herself. She knew her herbs too, what they seasoned and what they cured. She knew her black root and goldenseal and lady slipper and prickly ash, and where to find them.
Cass took charge of the chickens too. They lived penned up on the other side of the house. Chickens and me didn’t get along. If I had to keep them, I’d as soon not eat them. But Cass had a hand with fowl. She named them too, every chick of them, before they feathered out. Mama said better not name anything you’re fixing to eat. But Cass did. She went right on naming them, under her breath.
We thought we et pretty good. Noah was right smart to kill game: squirrel and prairie chickens and in the fall before it wintered up, possum. Quail, pheasant, ducks. We baked corn dodgers and fried meat in the fireplace. But white beans, gristle, and cornmeal mush got us through the darkest part of winter. Here in April we were still weeks from anything out of our garden.
Oh, you can’t picture how we lived back then. There wasn’t but a string latch on the door. And we didn’t have a stove of any description. I’d never seen one. We kindled fires with flint and steel and cooked over an open flame in the kitchen. We baked in a Dutch oven set into the bricks beside the hearth. In the winter we lived in this kitchen to keep warm. That’s how it was with us. We didn’t know any better.
Noah hung Paw’s fowling piece with the pouch and the shotbag on the chimney. Mama wanted him to sit at the head of the table, in Paw’s chair. It was to remind Noah that he was all the man this family had.
We turned back our sleeves and fell to our supper. Mama had seen Cass’s red, swollen, staring eyes. Noah was his silent self. Most times, he could make a tree seem talkative. I heard a distant rumble over the river and hoped it was thunder.
Long before people began hollering war, Mama was already afraid she’d lose Noah. Most boys hankered to go on the river. They’d hang around the landing, wanting to be taken on as roustabouts. They dreamed their boy-dreams of being steersmen, which was what apprentice pilots were called. They’d have settled for being strikers, wiping down the metalwork with oily rags. The names of the boats swam in their heads: the Gray Eagle, the Jubilee, the Neptune, the Rowena, the Fashion, the Vesuvius, the Arkansas Star. What a worry this had always been to Mama.
A darker cloud gathered over her last Christmastime when South Carolina seceded from the Union. They’d get the Cairo City Gazette down at the landing, only a day or so late. We weren’t backwoodsy people who still didn’t know Lincoln was President. The minute Mama heard that the cotton states were seceding, she feared anew for Noah.
Then this month when Little Napoleon Beauregard fired on Fort Sumter in Charleston Bay, the whole sky darkened. Another week and Lincoln had proclaimed his blockade of the Southern ports. Now he was calling for seventy-five thousand volunteers to fight.
Mama couldn’t spare Noah. But she couldn’t forbid him much longer. Him and me would be sixteen in the fall. He was a good boy, steadier than Paw. But he was restless as a riderless horse.
We et our meal by the light of the kitchen fire. Mama looked up once, stole a glance at Noah. But he was only a dark, broad-shouldered shape against the crackling fire.
It was big doings that night, a dance in the room over Rodgers’s store. This was the first such gathering of the spring. A fiddler was in from Cobden, and Mr. Chilly Attabury to do the calling.
We wore our other dresses, the linsey ones we tried to save back. Noah wore an old black coat of Paw’s, and he was lost in it. We went, though. Everybody in the district who wasn’t tied to the bed or locked in the attic went. Everybody would be there, bar the riffraff who lived around the ruins of a still, south of town.
Mama thought we ought to make a showing. She didn’t want people talking behind our backs. She didn’t want talk against Paw, or Cass. Mama had her pride, though she said herself that pride could hollow you out.
Grand Tower was only a settlement in them days, somewhere between a landing and a town. They hadn’t gotten around to a survey of the place. It was mainly strung along a single dirt road we called Front Street. People said that if war come to us, it would either make Grand Tower or break it.
Many an old plug workhorse stood at the rail outside Rodgers’s store. Fiddle music whined from the upper windows. Upstairs, we found the room crowded under the yellow tallow light.
Mama made for the mourners’ bench where the older women sat out, looking on. There were sets already dancing down the room and another square going at the end with the young kids. But Cass stuck close to Mama. Cass wouldn’t mix, and there wasn’t anything you could do about it.
Mama was still young enough to shake a leg. But Paw
wasn’t there. Old Aunt Madge Bledsoe made room between herself and an aged country woman named Mrs. Harod Yancey. It was her whose sister-in-law, Mrs. Champ Hazelrigg, was et by her own hogs. Mrs. Yancey was old-fashioned even for them days and dipped snuff on a stick to rub on her gums. With a quick nod Mama settled in with Cass beside her.
Noah and me hung at the edges, watching the dancing. There was no shame in partnering with your brother, but it took Noah time to set his mind to it.
Mr. Chilly Attabury was in full spate, calling,
Bird in,
Buzzard in,
Pretty good bird
For the shape she’s in.
Hands clapped, elbows flapped, and that old sprung floor rolled and heaved. Mr. Chilly Attabury could grow topical in his calling:
Buchanan out,
Give a shout!
Lincoln in,
Show a shin!
People whooped at that, and fashioned footwork to go with it. But then he went too far as he was apt to do when he called,
Jeff Davis is a President,
Abe Lincoln is a fool,
Jeff Davis rides a big bay horse,
Abe Lincoln rides a mule.
Jeff Davis had just been made President of this new country the Southerners—the Secesh—thought they’d started up, and Lincoln was our own Illinois man. The Southerners whooped with approval. Catcalls and heavy stomping came from the rest.
Mr. Attabury drew up just shy of a fistfight and fell back on an old faithful, “Texas Star”:
Gents to the center
And back to the bar,
Ladies to the center
To form the star.
Now we were in there with them, me and Noah, backing and forthing and sashaying with the rest. I tried to switch my meager skirts and find my place as the star turned to the tune.
Then somehow I was across from that young man named Curry Marshall. Now our elbows linked, so I tried to grow light on my feet. I bit my lips to make them pink, and tried to simper. But I expect Curry Marshall was looking straight over my head. He was a big, tall galoot, tall as Noah.