Chaneysville Incident

by David Bradley

  Or perhaps not. For we have lost some of our belief, and so we cannot see our ancestors, and it is therefore possible that things have changed in the Afterlife; that the slaves have rebelled and killed the masters (hardly a comforting possibility) or perhaps something has been worked out, and all the horror is, for the spirits, a matter of little moment. That is possible. But I cannot imagine how it could happen. And I do not believe it has. Because when the wind is right, I think that I can smell the awful odor of eternal misery. And I know for certain that if I allow myself to listen, I can hear the sound of it. Oh, yes. Surely, I can hear.

  The funeral was ending. It had been a pretty good funeral so far; not High Church, but stately and dignified. My mother, acting for Scott, of course, had arranged everything. The casket was top-of-the-line, lead-lined, hermetically sealed, guaranteed for five thousand years or until the Day of Judgment, whichever came first. The flowers were plentiful and beautiful. The only disagreement we had had was about how to dress him; she had wanted to put him in a suit, but I had insisted that he be outfitted properly, and so when I purchased my own supplies I had got the things myself: a new union suit of comfortable cotton, a warm flannel shirt by Woolrich, new overalls, Big Murphs, which look a little baggy but wear like iron, wool-cotton blend socks and a woolen watch cap, cotton painter’s gloves, all he would need with the weather turning warmer. (I had bought him a new pair of shoes too, good sturdy hiking shoes by Georgia Giant, but shoes are a tricky thing, and I had thought it best to put his old pair in with him, just in case the new ones hurt his feet.) She had balked a little at all that, but I had simply ignored her, and I suspect that Scott managed to quiet her down, because when I came in with the Mail Pouch chewing tobacco and the mason jar of Georgia Moon corn whiskey, she had said nothing. But I had not been fooled—nobody beats Yvette Stanton Washington that easily—and I had got to the undertaker at the proper psychological moment and told him that she had made a mistake in the instructions, and the casket was supposed to be open at the funeral. (The proper psychological moment had been when I had brought in the things from the cabin, including his shotgun, along with a couple of boxes of factory loads.)

  It was a pretty crowded coffin by the time I got finished. And when the final viewing took place, there were a few shaken heads. Quite a few. As a matter of fact, there had been a good deal of whispering; they all thought I was crazy. But Yvette Stanton Washington had stared them all into silence, her haughty glance giving the impression that everything was exactly as she had planned it, and if they didn’t understand the deep religious significance of it all, it was simply because they were ignorant.

  The preacher had done almost as well. The eulogy was a masterpiece, a web of half-truths and, if you knew anything about Old Jack, you would have had to add, of heresies, for he had possessed all the virtues the preacher called Christian without once embracing the faith.

  The undertaker was good too, smooth without being slippery, and he had orchestrated the ticklish business of getting the casket out of the church and into the hearse with great style. The pallbearers, except for me, were old men not far from the grave themselves. But the dolly on which the coffin had sat rolled smoothly, and the undertaker had collapsed it at precisely the right time, and all we had to do was ease the box down the cement steps and onto the tailboard. And he had skillfully maneuvered the heavy hearse across the Hill, making it seem as though he were driving on solid pavement instead of a rutted, muddy track that only the charitable or the deluded could call a road. It was harder for the rest of us—we had to contend with the mud firsthand. But somehow we had formed ourselves into an oddly shaped stream of humanity, and we had flowed into the burial ground and pooled around the open grave: the minister, small and solemn, and the undertaker, professional and detached, both of them as comfortable in the presence of the dead as they were in the presence of the living; my mother and a few of what had once been the army of the WH&FMS ladies, seeming shrunken now, their once fleshy bosoms fallen almost to their waists; a few of the old men, Uncle Bunk Clay among them; surprisingly, Miss Linda Jamison, her face looking ravaged, but her body slim and her coat understated and expensive; and then, ranged out in a line down the slope a little ways where the earth had not been torn open by the gravedigging and they could stand on the grass that covered somebody else’s grave so as to keep the mud off their shoes, Randall Scott and his buddies, the sons of those whom Moses Washington had suborned with whiskey and money.

  Then the preacher began to pray, reading from the Book of Common Prayer instead of the Methodist Discipline, no doubt at my mother’s request. But the words were probably the same, anyway: “Unto Almighty God we commend the soul of our brother departed, and we commit his body to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust….” I did not listen to him; I stood on that hillside and listened to the air. But there was no wind. It would come, though; I believed that it would come. “…Lord Jesus Christ; at whose coming in glorious majesty to judge the world the earth and the sea shall give up their dead; and the corruptible bodies of those who sleep in Him shall be changed, and made like unto His own glorious body; according to the mighty working whereby He is able to subdue all things unto Himself.” The white men stirred a bit, thinking that the final amen was near, knowing that, in their church, it would have been. But it was not their church. And nothing was finished; it had just begun.

  The minister looked at Uncle Bunk and nodded. Uncle Bunk stepped forward, stood in front of the casket and looked at those arrayed before it. “I knew this man,” Uncle Bunk said. “Knew him well. He wasn’t much for preachin’ and he wasn’t much for prayin’, but he knew how to help as good as any Christian ever did. I mind a time, back before the War, end of the Depression, when didn’t none of us have nothin’ to eat. He come to my house and the eight of us, me an’ my wife an’ six kids, was eatin’ boiled beans, and not much of that. He said to me, ‘Bunk, how long you gonna eat them beans?’ I said I didn’t know, but there wasn’t no work, an’ I suspected we was gonna eat beans until they was gone, an’ then start in on the walls. He just shook his head an’ went out, but he come back later with four chickens. Now, we knew he stole them chickens. And some folks would say stealin’ ’em made him a sinner. But the good Lord knows a sinner from a brother, and I thank God I do too. A sinner’s a man who steals a chicken an’ eats it. A brother’s a man who steals a chicken an’ shares it.”

  “Amen,” the people said. The white men stirred again, shuffling their feet, thinking that was it. But it was only a small amen, not the final one. Because then Uncle Bunk began to sing, his voice off key and wavering and old: “My brother’s gone to glory, I want to go there too….”

  And they caught it up then, fumbling a little as they found their way into a key that would accommodate them all, finding it and settling and strengthening:

  “In bright mansions above,

  In bright mansions above,

  Lord, I want to live up yonder

  In bright mansions above.”

  When the song died there was a silence, and Uncle Bunk moved through it, limping back to his place among them. The white men were looking confused, not sure what would happen next, lost without a printed order of service. But the rest of them waited patiently. For the spirit.

  It came from among the women this time, through Aunt Emma Hawley, no words, just the thread of a song rising, in the old call:

  “I looked over Jordan and what did I see…”

  And they slipped in with the response:

  “Comin’ for to carry me home?”

  The voices strong and steady, taking even the call away from her, doing it in unison:

  “But a band of angels comin’ after me,

  Comin’ for to carry me home.”

  And then the chorus, which even the white men knew, having probably sung it half-drunk at a lodge meeting:

  “Swing low, sweet chariot,

  Comin’ for to carry me home…”

 
When the song died, we stood in silence. Waiting. And then she came forward, surprising me, not because she came—she hadn’t planned this part, but she knew how it went—but because there were tears on her cheeks.

  “I had a husband,” she said, “and I have a son. This man was a brother to my husband. Walked with him, and talked with him. Saved his life, more than once. Saved him for me. I owe this man for that.”

  “Amen,” they said.

  “And this man was a father to my boy. Taught him things I couldn’t teach him. Showed him things I couldn’t show him.” She turned her head far to the right, looking straight at me. “I didn’t like that. It made me fear. It still makes me fear, sometimes.” She looked back at the rest of them. “But he loved my son. And he taught him the things he taught him because that was what he believed a man should know. He taught him because he loved him.” She paused then, for a moment, but we knew she was not finished. “ ‘And Jesus said unto him, Feed my lambs.’ ”

  “Amen,” they said.

  And then she began her song:

  “Oh, sooner in the morning when I rise,

  The young lambs must find the way

  With crosses and trials on every side

  The young lambs must find the way.”

  It was not a song I knew, and not one that most of them were familiar with; and the singing of the response and the full chorus was a little tentative and thin. But they found the words inside them somewhere:

  “Oh, the old sheep done know the road,

  The old sheep done know the road,

  The old sheep done know the road,

  The young lambs must find the way.”

  And when they were done she gave me one look and went back to her place.

  It should have been me then, but I couldn’t move, couldn’t think of anything to say. But they waited, calmly, patiently, not hurrying, as if they had all the time in the world. Then there was a little stirring, not much, among the ranks of the white men. For a moment I feared it would be Scott, seizing the time to make one of his speeches. But it wasn’t; it was the Judge. His voice, clearly an alien one, rose. I resented it; I knew too much about him, or suspected it, anyway, not to. But there was nothing I could do but listen. At least he surprised me. From him I would have expected the Bible. But it was Tennyson:

  “Death closes all; but something ere the end,

  Some work of noble note, may yet be done,

  Not unbecoming men that strove with gods.

  The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks;

  The long day wanes, the slow moon climbs; the deep

  Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,

  ’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

  Push off, and sitting well in order smite

  The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

  To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

  Of all the western stars, until I die.”

  He turned his head and looked at me, and he, too, began, giving the age-old call:

  “Gonna lay down my burden…”

  and getting the response, strong, quick:

  “Down by the riverside, down by the riverside,

  Down by the riverside.”

  And then they did something odd—they dropped away and let him carry the call solo, as if he were one of them:

  “Gonna lay down my burden…”

  And came in again, just as strongly, behind him:

  “Down by the riverside,

  I ain’t gonna study war no more.”

  I did not sing with them. I was trying to think. Because I had to say something; had to: there was no more time. But I was too cold. I had drunk four strong toddies before the service, but still I was shivering, from the cold and the doubt; I had to speak, but I could not imagine what to say.

  But when the song died someone else stepped forward: Linda Jamison. She came all the way to the grave, her steps light and easy despite the muddy ground, all the way to the grave. She turned to face them. “This man saved my children,” she said. “They was sick, burnt up with fever in the middle of the summer. I had a doctor come—he give ’em pills and said for me to make ’em drink cold water and bathe them with cool cloths, to keep the fever down. That was easy for him to say; he had himself a Frigidaire. All I had was a spring. And I met this man here, the one you all used to call a heathen, while I was tryin’ to haul water across from that spring fast enough to keep it cool. He never said a word to me, never even called my name, but he carried those buckets home for me, and then he went away. When he come back he was carryin’ a hundred pounds of ice. He carried it all the way from town. He still never said a word. But he came back that evening with another hundred pounds of ice. I set up all night, bathin’ my babies. Some folks come around, thought I should leave that an’ take care a some other business. And maybe I would have. Maybe I woulda left my babies alone for just a little while—I never was no saint, nor much of a mother, either. But I was that night. Because that man who wouldn’t even call my name cared enough about my babies to bring that ice to me, and I couldn’t do no less. In the morning he come with more ice, and in the evening too. And that night he come and sat beside me, and he bathed my babies with cool water—he used those hands you all always said was so damn dirty. Maybe they was dirty. But he used ’em, and he stayed awake when I dozed off, and in the morning my babies’ fevers broke. I told him thank you. He didn’t say a word; he just went away. But every time one of my girls was sick he found out some way, and he come and brought whatever he thought they needed; and he give me money. He never said what for, but I knew; he give me money so I wouldn’t have to leave my children just because somebody come wantin’ a little pleasure. I’ll never forget that. And when he was sick, I went to see if I could help him. But he didn’t want help from me, or anybody on this Hill, either. He didn’t want help at all. All he wanted was to see one boy that grew up over here and went away like anybody else with sense. He didn’t think that boy would come back. But he did come back.” She turned her head and looked at me. “God bless him,” she said. She looked down at the grave a moment, and then she raised her eyes and looked at them standing there on the slope. “God bless ’em both,” she said, “and to hell with all of you.”

  I heard them gasp a little, and heard the silence as she walked back to her place, but it was all right then. I stopped trying to think; I went on impulse and said the words that came. I saw the preacher’s head rise, his face take on a puzzled expression, because what I was saying sounded biblical; it was biblical, but not their Bible.

  “O death, how bitter it is to remember you for a man at peace among his goods, to a man without worries, who prospers in everything, and still has the strength to feed himself. O death, your sentence is welcome to a man in want, whose strength is failing, to a man worn out with age, worried about everything, disaffected and beyond endurance. Do not dread death’s sentence; remember those who came before you and those who will come after….”

  And then, just when the words moved into the wrong stream, saying things I did not want to say, there were others:

  “In their descendants there remains a rich inheritance born of them. Their descendants stand by the covenants and, thanks to them, so do their children’s children. Their offspring will last forever, their glory will not fade….”

  There was more to that too, but it wasn’t right, but the words I wanted were there, in my mind; and this time I knew why I wanted them:

  “I am black, but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon. Look not upon me, because I am black, because the sun hath looked upon me. My mother’s sons have turned against me, and bade me tend their vineyards; but my own vineyard have I not kept….”

  I was finished then, and I stood for a moment, searching for a song. But before I could sing it, the song came from somewhere, the old slave call to clandestine worship or desperate escape:

  “Steal away, steal away, steal awa
y to Jesus;

  Steal away, steal away home,

  I ain’t got long to stay here.”

  And humming it gently, without signal or ceremony they softly stole away.

  The cabin stank of dying.

  One of the world’s most powerful smells, and one of the most ineffable. And intolerable. So after I got the fire going and the four galvanized buckets filled with water and set on the stove, I took down the wooden shutters that blocked the openings that served for windows, and I hauled the bedding out into the clearing, made sure it was downwind, doused it with kerosene, and set it alight. Then I went back in and began to take things off the shelves. By the time I finished that, the water was boiling. I poured strong industrial-strength detergent into a bucket and, with a long-handled brush made to spread tar, proceeded to scrub down the walls.

  I did it three times, leaving the last bucket of water to wash the implements, the tin dishes and cups, the pots and skillet, the trappings that a man builds up over years of living. The things I couldn’t wash I wiped with damp rags. I oiled what needed to be oiled. And then I put everything back on the shelves, just as he had had it, his fishing gear and hunting gear and tools, his cooking utensils and the jars of food that were left. I got more water and set it to heat. Then I began to bring things over the ridge.