Totentanz

by Al Sarrantonio

  His dreams were of another kind. He lay with his hands behind his head, one foot braced on the side of the bunk and the other on the wall of the truck, and he let his memories wash over him. This was as close to dreaming as he came.

  He was housed in blackness. The back of the truck was closed off, the dull metal doors shut and the two cut-out windows shuttered with black tape. He had done the taping himself. When the truck stopped, he did not get up to relieve himself or to eat or to stretch his legs. Occasionally he was jostled as the truck ran over a pothole, but he merely set himself back on the bunk and continued to dream.

  There were other trucks, in front and in back, and the noises of these only added to the roar, but he heard none of this. There had been a time when trucks had amazed him, when electric lights and gasoline and telephones and phonographs had amazed him, but this time had long passed. Once you got past the fact that these things existed, everything else was the same. People, he had found, were always the same.

  He closed his eyes, but sleep, or what happened to him that was like sleep, would not come. The truck took a long curve, and he felt the weight of his body shift with the pull of it. Darkness eluded him. Finally something of the blackness descended; then the truck stopped abruptly, started up again and almost immediately bounced into a rut. This tossed him enough to one side that he had to reposition himself on the stiff bunk.

  Giving up, he lay back with his eyes open and dreamed.

  He was on a train. Someone was tapping him, pushing at his shoulder to wake him up. He swam out of his sleep to see an earnest face under a blue cap, bending over him. For a moment he thought it was an officer, but then he saw that the man's cap was of a different shade of blue and that the man's face was florid and full and not wartime slack at all. The man had a short mustache and looked at him urgently. "Your stop, soldier," the conductor said, nudging him a final time to make sure he was awake. "Your stop next.”

  He sat up all the way, pushing his boots against the seat in front of him as the conductor straightened and moved on, announcing the station in the failed stage basso he knew that all conductors of all times used.

  He looked out the window, ignoring the insistent ache in his leg where his wound had been pressed tight against the seat. He saw that, indeed, they were coming slowly into town. The sun was low, and it must be either sunset or sunrise, and he wasn't sure which and didn't much care. He felt wearier than he ever had before. He was a young man with a young face and curly reddish hair, and he had never been quite old enough to grow a mustache. His hands were large and his eyes were large and almost blue, and his mouth had never been the smiling kind, although he knew how to smile. He had smiled a long time ago, but he had not smiled since.

  With a sudden instinct, he wheeled up and out of his seat, pulled his duffel from the overhead rack and moved with clacking steps to the end of the car and down onto the exit platform. The train was losing speed and he stood half-in, half-out for a moment, feeling a stiff, artificial breeze across his face before letting go of the safety rail to jump onto the steep grade of the tracks. He landed on his feet, and then his right leg gave out suddenly, sending him down into a roll, but he came up into a sitting position unhurt, brushing the dust from his war-worn pants and coat. He got to his feet, knocking his hat against his leg and watching the train move off into the approaching station and then, for all he knew, into infinity.

  It was only after the train had made its short stop, almost immediately grinding into motion once more, that he turned his attention to the farm in the near distance.

  As his eyes studied it, an ache began deep within him, an ache that needed no encouragement and that he couldn't stop even if he had wanted to. In a way, he savored it. It was many aches in one: an ache for lost childhood; for the life that this farm—if not prosperous, at least life-serving—had once meant to him; an ache for the loss of his brother Tom; and above all, an ache of dull anticipation about what he would find here. He expected the worst. When the last few letters he had sent from the army hospital had gone unanswered, the last one even being returned, he knew that something had occurred, but he refused to admit that he knew until he had seen it with his own eyes. His father had always been a strong man, but there had been those times when he had been taken with that strange pain in his joints and been forced to go to his bed. Perhaps that had happened—but then, why hadn't he at least heard from Lucius? Lucius could read and write as well as any white man in Montvale, and for all intents and purposes, he was a member of the family. Over the years, Lucius had become almost an uncle.

  Now that he approached the farm, he saw that it looked abandoned. The whitewash was peeling from the fences and the front of the house; the big oak out front was dead—it looked as though it had been hit by lightning. No sign of animals or equipment any-where. And there, to the side of the barn, stood the small carousel his father had built with his own hands after seeing a picture of a European carousel in a penny magazine; now it was stripped and skeletal, the hand-carved horses and seats gone, the shell tilted to the ground off its axis.

  Wearily, his boots heavy on the groaning boards of the steps, he entered the house. The inside was, if anything, worse than the outside. The stove and furniture were gone, prey to poachers. All that was left in his own room was a thin shelf hanging over his rusting bed, his old Bible on it, half-torn. Even the bed was only half there, the head and one side canting precariously on the dirty floor.

  He made his way back out to the yard. The sun was sinking boldly now, a sharp ball of orange dropping in the west behind the low hills. With a grunt, he adjusted his meager pack and tramped across to the barn.

  It was empty and damp, and he knew that it would have to be pulled down and replaced if he hoped to make a new start here. He didn't know if he wanted to do that. With a sigh, he turned to leave when a sound from a far corner caught his attention.

  He called out in a loud, stern voice, "Someone there?"

  Reflexively his hand went to his rifle, but he gradually lowered it.

  "I said, anyone there?"

  In the failing light he saw nothing in the rear of the barn: a few overturned crates and a stack of yellowed newspapers. Nothing to make a noise. He was about to dismiss the sound when a sudden memory came to him. Cautiously he made his way to the back of the barn, overturning the crates and moving the newspapers aside. After clearing away a thick mat of dust, straw and dirt, he uncovered a wooden door set evenly in the floor. With the tip of his rifle he hooked the metal ring and slowly raised the trap.

  He shouted down into the darkness: "Come on up."

  There was silence. Tiny fingers of fear began to climb his back because he knew there was someone down there in that dark hole. Then suddenly a face filled the opening, and a voice was calling his name in disbelief.

  "My God, is that you? They told me you was killed in Gettysburg with your brother."

  ``Lucius!"

  He dropped the rifle and helped the black man from the hole.

  Lucius looked half-dead. There were circles under his eyes, his always-thin frame was shrunken to painful leanness, dark skin hung on tired bones. His hair had turned white, and he had the unsleeping look of a hunted man.

  "Thank God for that hole, that old railroad hole, or I would have been hung six weeks ago."

  "Where's your wife and boy?"

  "They're safe, over in Potterville with the Carsons, my wife's family," Lucius said, lowering his frail body to the ground. "I sent them there after your daddy was murdered."

  "Murdered!"

  "Shot like a dog nearly two months ago. I'm almost sure it was one of them Major boys. They had a big bonfire and drew lots one night. Your daddy held out a long time. They wanted this land bad, figured the town would expand like mad with the war ended, and when he heard that both you and Tom was dead, he nearly gave up and gave it to them. But he held out until they shot him dead."

  "What were you doing in the hole like that'?"

  "Couldn
't get away. Stayed to take care of your daddy's burial and then Petey Graham, that slow boy, he come running out to tell me they've decided to hang me, made up some story about me putting my hands on a little white girl. What they really know is I saw your daddy killed." He dropped his head. "The town's turned bad."

  Seeing the hard look that had come into the other's eyes, Lucius grabbed him by the arm, holding strong.

  "Don't you think about that! It's all of them. The whole town. They want this land, and it'd be best if you just left. Let them have it. There's nothing any of us can do about it now."

  "I want you to leave here."

  Lucius' eyes were pleading. "Please, don't do anything! They'll kill you!"

  "Can you get to your wife?"

  Some of the fight went out of the old man. "They looking for me everywhere."

  "I want you to try to get away."

  "Let me come with you," Lucius said abruptly, raising himself painfully to a standing position.

  "No. Get to the next county and tell the sheriff what's happened here."

  "Please don't do this,” Lucius said. When there was no answer, Lucius took his arm. "Listen to me," he said sternly. "When you was a boy, I watched you, and I knew that behind the quiet there was a rage in you. You'd play with your brother, and he'd take something from you and laugh, and a fire would burn in you. But you never let it out. Now I fear you letting it out. Once you give in to hate, you can't come back. Your own father taught me that, when he saw what was building inside me 'cause of the way white people treat black people."

  There was still no response, and now Lucius took him by both shoulders, staring straight into his eyes. "You listen to me. While I was down in this hole, hiding like a dog, I had dreams. I dreamed terrible things, worse even than your daddy dying. I seen you come back from the war with the same hate in your eyes I see now, and then I seen all Montvale go up in flames."

  A faint smile touched the other's lips. "You were always dreaming, Lucius." The smile drifted away. "Dreams don't mean anything."

  "Listen to me! In my dreams I seen a boy, a black boy, and only he could save you. I seen him walking through the flames."

  Seeing that he was unmoved, Lucius let go of him. "If dreams mean nothing, then save yourself. First you got to fight your hate, though."

  The returned soldier took in the desolation around him. He thought of the long, slow pain that had come to settle in his heart and now could never be moved out—the pain that not Lucius, not anyone, could remove, that was even at this moment turning from a soft thing to something rock-hard. His eyes settled on the ruined carousel, one edge visible through the barn door. An old red-and-white banner hung in limp shreds from an overhead railing.

  He touched Lucius' shoulder without looking at him and then turned away.

  "Good-bye," he said.

  By the time he had made his slow way into the middle of Main Street, the whole town of Montvale knew that he was back from the war. People hid. He was not supposed to have come back from the war; he was dead they had been told, and all the damage had long since been done. But here he was, and no ghost. Ghosts didn't wear dust and worn boots; ghosts didn't have dull blue-gray eyes that had seen too much too soon. Ghosts didn't let their swords tarnish and their rifle barrels clog with mud, and rust with rainwater, or their knapsacks fall open, spilling provisions all the way down the road into town. Those were not ghost provisions that trailed like peas, waiting to be picked up later by boys and girls out of school: a tin plate for one, a can of old beans for another, a spoon and fork, attached by a button at the handle, for a third. Ghosts didn't make real tears, long-dried; didn't harden their real, beating hearts into lumps of smooth, unbeating stone; didn't want to burnish their swords again and clean those rifles to use in a new kind of war. Ghosts didn't stand in the dead center of a hiding town and say, at first in a low mutter and then in a rasp and then in a hard, loud, plank-shaking demand:

  "Who killed my father?"

  His question hung like a storm cloud over the street, slowly spreading into every cubbyhole, kitchen closet and corner in Montvale. No one escaped his words; no one shut them out of his ears, no matter how hard he clasped his hands over them. The question pushed its way into every dry cellar, each pantry, each bedroom and outhouse in all of Montvale, and when he repeated the words, one at a time and in a voice no louder, each word somehow took on a louder, sharper edge all by itself, as if the syllables were beating one against the other, making mountain echoes that came back louder than they had gone out.

  "Who. Killed. My. Father?"

  He looked up from the dusty street at a glint of light. Somewhere in Montvale, in one of the tight cubbyholes, the tightest of all, a crack appeared. Soon the crack turned into a good-sized hole and then into a door. A man appeared behind the door, tiny-seeming at first and as frail, it looked, as a deathbed mouse, but in a matter of minutes the man achieved a remarkable metamorphosis. In the shadows of the doorway, he grew teeth and bones and flesh, filled out to room size. The new lion of a man wore a pocket watch and a suit to go with it, gray-striped, red-white-and-blue suspendered. He wore white shoes, so white and daily polished they looked painted on fresh each morning. The man's lapels were as big as his hands—the lapels wide for holding and the hands large and moist for doing that chore. Babies would lodge easily in those hands, and those hands could wave to crowds a mile deep; the littlest boy in the back row would feel they were waving right at him, turning over and reaching out right for him alone, lifting his shirt to reach right into his very red heart and pluck out the wishes there and then form those wishes into real clay. Those hands could be everywhere at once—patting, nudging, cajoling, punching lightly with the punch of a shared joke. They were hands to be laid upon the head, hands to heal any wound of mind or soul.

  They were a doctor's hands.

  Or the opposite of a doctor's.

  The hands moved out of the shadows first, pulling the rest of the body with them. And then appeared the plump suit and Old Glory suspenders; the pocket watch, with Abe Lincoln's face etched on the case, hanging at just the right loop over the vest; and then above it all appeared a face to match the hands, all smile and thinning hair, and kind cow eyes as wet as his palms and the color of an August sky reflected in a fish pond. The nose of a Caesar. And teeth, so many and so white and wide they made you smile and forget the real hard look at the bottom of those fish-pond eyes.

  The man, all of him, stepped with a grunt into the sunset, stepped heavily off the porch of his office and held out his large, moist hand, offered his moist, hard eyes and thin, smiling mouth.

  "Well, well," the man said, "and here you are after we just rolled up the banners and put away the cakes and pies and let the ice cream melt and sent the marching bands home."

  The damp hand remained suspended in air. "Tell me what happened to my father."

  "Well," the lion, the fat man, said, moving both hands to his lapels in one deft, curving motion, "it's a complicated business.—

  "Tell me who killed him." His fingers moved around the hilt of his rusty sword.

  The fat man drew his lapels back, slid his hands down into his cavernous pockets. Despite the marvelous control of his face, sweat beaded on the hairline of his forehead and the top of his lip. Mustering all his best attributes, in a voice that for any other listener would have been accompanied by a firm, friendly arm around the shoulder, he said, "Well, he just up and died."

  "That's not the truth, Mayor."

  "Well, son, I'm afraid it is. You see, after your daddy learned that both your brother and you was killed over at Gettysburg, well, he just sort of gave up hope. A couple folks even heard him say words to that effect. He said, 'Life ain't worth living without my boys, I can't see any use going on this way.' And he just gave up on it. 'Course he didn't know you were alive and all, none of us knew that. And that's the damn shame of it, because that might have turned the trick. I really think it would have. He loved you, son, always said you wer
e his favorite. It's a damn shame he didn't know you were safe."

  With any other man, he would have ended this speech with a firm squeeze on the shoulder and then separation, to be followed by a walk down the street and a light on a new cigar.

  "Who shot him?"

  Again a line of sweat broke on the fat man's brow. "Well, now, we never did find that out. Consensus was, it was a hand he had working over there with him, named Lucius. Black fellow. Ran away after the shooting, so we figured it must have been him. Sheriff Deacon, he did a real good job trying to track that boy down, but just had no luck. None at all. And couldn't find any reason to think it might have been any other way. Unless of course. . . ." The mayor caught himself before plunging ahead, and then, feeling he had to complete what he had started, said in a much lower Tm-real-sorry-for-you,-boy' voice, "Unless, of course, your daddy took his own life."

  Eyes, blue-gray ice, turned on the mayor.

  " 'Course we ruled that out," the mayor added. "Doc said there was definitely foul play. 'Course people always will talk . . . But we're sure, we're all damn sure, that black fellow did it."

  "I heard otherwise."

  "Did you?" The mayor feigned slight amusement and reproach. Once again his hand reached out of its own accord to grasp, to assure; once again the hand fell limp to crawl defeated back into the mayor's pocket.

  "Like I said, I heard otherwise."

  His finger moved smoothly to the stock of his rifle, felt the old use there, the tiredness, the defeat. With practiced effort, his fingers sought to warm the rifle back to life, put the spark of death back into it. "What I heard was, the whole town murdered him." His voice stayed cool and even. "I heard lots of things." Once again his eyes bored into the fat man. “Tell me, who owns my father's land now?"

  The mayor's sweaty hands had nowhere to go, nothing to hold onto and squeeze with falsehood. They played around his pockets, his lapels, his watch chain, and finally his watch, winding it so hard the spring inside broke with an audible sound.