Chaneysville Incident

by David Bradley

  I stood up again and looked downstream, trying to find a pattern in the placement of the trees. “Nothing, really,” I said. “Just some stones and mortar that must have been part of a millrace down there.”

  “Does that mean something?”

  “No,” I said. “There were mills all over the place, on every stream that had enough size to power one.”

  She turned her head, faced upstream. “I don’t see anything.”

  “You have to look downstream,” I said. “And you probably wouldn’t see anything anyway; it might date back as far as 1730. They built to last in those days, but the thing could have stood for two hundred and fifty years and still be nothing more than a pile of rocks now.”

  “Couldn’t we find that?”

  “Probably. All we’d have to do is follow the millrace until we fell over some rocks and got our feet wet—assuming the rocks haven’t been hauled away to build something else.”

  “Oh,” she said. “It’s important, though, isn’t it? To find it?”

  “No,” I said. “It has nothing to do with where we’re going.”

  “Then why are you still looking for it?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m just curious.” I stopped looking and made my way back up the bank. “It’s not far now,” I said.

  We went on, forging through the snow. In a hundred yards the road stopped being a road at all; I could sense it through the snow, from the feel of the ground, but it made curious twists and there were fairly large trees growing in the center of it. I stopped and looked at one closely, wishing I had a saw.

  “What…?”

  “This is an old road,” I said. “It was built before they had bulldozers to knock down trees or dynamite to blast stumps; that’s why it turns so much, to go between trees too big to blast out with black powder—”

  “I see you twisting and turning,” she said, “but I don’t see any trees, except the ones you practically run into.”

  “That’s because the trees it was going around aren’t there anymore. Maybe somebody cut them down later and the stumps rotted, or they just died. But the others are new growth—”

  “That’s a new tree?” she said. “It’s pretty big.”

  “ ‘New’ meaning thirty or forty years. Which means this road stopped being used that long ago. Which means nobody much was using it when Moses Washington came up here and shot himself.”

  “Does that mean—”

  “Stop asking me if it means anything. I don’t know if it means anything. I don’t know if anything does.”

  I turned away and went on, moving badly, faster than I had to, getting the snow higher on my legs than I had to. I heard her behind me, floundering to keep up, and I knew that it was wrong, that I should slow down for her, but something was pushing me, and I just kept on, and then I heard her calling me, and whatever it was that was making me move that way went away and I stopped and turned and went back to her. She was standing in the middle of the road, the breath exploding from her mouth, the steam rising from her forehead. It took me almost a minute to get back to her.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “No,” I said. “You didn’t do anything….”

  “I know that,” she said. “I’m sorry that I got you mad enough to try to kill me.” She smiled at me and put her head on my arm and rubbed it.

  I took out my handkerchief and wiped her brow. “You can’t get overheated. You’ll catch pneumonia.”

  “I know that,” she said. “You’re the one that forgot.”

  “Yeah,” I said, and put the handkerchief away.

  “Never mind,” she said. “I’ll survive. Only for God’s sake tell me how far we have to go.”

  I realized that I had lost track of distance, of elapsed time, even of direction, had lost track of everything but the meanderings of the road. I looked around. “Just…” I stopped.

  “What is it?”

  “Here,” I said.

  “Here?”

  “Yes,” I said. I pointed to the left. “Up there.”

  “That,” she said, “is not here.”

  But I barely heard her. Because I had left the road by that time and had gone blundering through the underbrush, searching with my boots for a path. In a moment I found one, or at least a smoother way that could have been a path, and was following it up along the curve of the ridge. I came to the top of the rise and started down the other side. And then I realized that the slope was falling away to my right and that as I followed it, the sun was moving to my left; the hillside was twisting, coming around to face south. I moved faster then, surer of where I was going. The trees thinned rapidly, then stopped altogether; I came to a halt there, at the edge of the timber, where a ruined stone wall thrust up from beneath. Beyond that the hillside was smooth and clean and white, interrupted only by the rounded tops of the gravestones. The hillside fell away into a silent valley, the snow cover deep and cottony-looking, shining golden in the sun. A few giant shapes moved across the snow, the shadows of clouds.

  In a few minutes I heard her coming up beside me, breathing deeply. She stopped and I heard her breath catch, and I knew what she would be thinking: that it was beautiful down there. I was ready to agree with her. But then the wind came driving up the valley, lifting the calm snow into a white whirlwind, not so much drifting it as driving it forward in a wall. Then the wind hit me, tearing through my coat and skin and into my bones, and I remembered what hillside that was, and I stood there, shivering with the cold and looking out over the place where Moses Washington had died.

  “Here,” she said, after a while.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “It looks like…”

  “A graveyard,” I said. “Family graveyard. Belonging to a family named Iiames.”

  “He killed himself in a graveyard?”

  “No,” I said. “Not in it. Just beyond the edge of it. The southeast corner.”

  “You need to find the exact spot,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said. “Just looking at it isn’t helping anything.”

  “How are you going to do that?”

  I sighed. “I’m going to go in there and tramp around over people’s graves and figure out where the graves stop and the field begins.” The wind kicked up then, and I shivered. I reached into the pocket of my coat and brought out the flask, raised it, drank. The liquor tasted raw and it didn’t do any good. I wiped my mouth on my glove and put the flask away. She didn’t say anything. “I guess I’d better get at it.”

  She stepped back then, back behind me, and put her arms around me, holding the base of my belly with both hands. I stood there for a minute, but she wasn’t helping any more than the whiskey had, and so I reached down and pried her hands loose.

  I climbed over the wall, moving stiffly, and went to the nearest gravestone: I checked the name, not because I wasn’t sure, but because I wanted to be certain. The letters of the name were hard to make out, but I managed to trace out an I and an A chiseled into the gray stone. Enough. Enough for me to go flipping through the cards in my mind: in the year of our Lord 1758, in the first month, on the twenty-sixth day, Richard Iiames was buried on the farm which he owned. And in the year of our Lord 1958, in the eighth month, on the seventh day, Moses Washington, son of Lamen, son of C.K., son of Zack, son of some philandering Cherokee, had seen fit to blow his brains out in close proximity to Richard Iiames’s remains. And it still made no damned sense.

  “Something wrong?” she said.

  “No,” I said. I started walking along the ranks of stones. They were set about six feet apart. There were twelve stones in the full row; that made sense. An even dozen. Twelve pews on each side of a church. Twelve disciples, if you counted Judas. So when they had made the graveyard, they had decided on twelve across, and when they got to the twelfth they had started again, on the right probably. I went back to the beginning of the rank and paced off the distance between the first and sec
ond stones in the file; about eight feet. I looked along the second rank. Some of the stones appeared to be missing, but that wasn’t so strange—they had probably been there for two hundred years; it made sense that some would fall down or break off. I paced off the distance to the third file. Eight feet. But when I looked at the rank it seemed that most of the stones were out of line; I got down and sighted along the rank to be sure. They were out of line. But the ones that were out of line were in line with each other; some were three feet too close to the second file, some were two feet too far away. And then I saw that two of the ones that were out of line were in the same file. I nodded to myself.

  “Did you find something?” she said.

  “Not really,” I said. “They started put burying twelve across, probably leaving space for a wife next to her husband, or vice versa. But reality complicated that little pattern. That man there”—I pointed to a stone—“lost a wife, and remarried. And that woman there”—I pointed again—“lost two children. She may have died in childbirth—”

  “How can you tell all that?”

  “From the spacing. The children were buried at the mother’s feet. There’s a full grave, eight feet long, for the mother, then a shorter one, five feet, for the children. The other full graves, the ones beside the mothers, are probably the husbands—”

  “But there aren’t any children at the feet of the ones you say are the husbands—”

  “ ‘It’s a wise father that knows his own child,’ ” I said.

  She didn’t say anything.

  “You wanted to know about this place?” I said. “You wanted to know all about this County? Well, it’s all right here in this graveyard. Somewhere in here is the grave of a man named Richard Iiames. He was part of a group of thirteen that came here in 1728. Oldest continuous settlement in the County; west of the Susquehanna, for that matter.”

  “Where did they come from?” she said.

  “Virginia,” I said.

  She didn’t say anything, and in a way I was glad, because if she had I might have told her the rest of it. But in another way I was not; in another way I was hoping she would say something, would ask a question, give me something more I could explain. But she didn’t. So I climbed back over the wall and walked to the southeast corner. And then I stood there.

  I don’t know what I was expecting. I don’t know what I was hoping for. A flash of light, maybe. Maybe thunder rolling. Or just a burst of insight. Certainly I was expecting something. And certainly whatever it was I was expecting, or hoping for, didn’t happen. I just stood there, shivering a little more than usual, maybe, but that was all. After a while I fumbled out the flask and drank from it, drank it all. I capped it, and put it away. And then I stood there some more, with the whiskey turning to ice in my belly.

  “Anything?” she said.

  “What?” I said. “What would there be? Twenty years ago somebody blew his brains out and bled into the dirt. They took the body away, so there’d be no bones, and the blood soaked into the soil, and that’s covered up with snow. So what the hell would there be?”

  “You’re the one who wanted to come,” she said softly.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m the one who wanted to come.”

  I stood there some more, looking out over the valley, and waited. “All right,” I said finally. “That’s it. Let’s go.” I turned quickly, too quickly, and felt my feet go slipping out from under me. I went down heavily, and my arms wouldn’t move fast enough to break my fall; I landed on my back, and felt something hard and solid slam into my head.

  “John?” She came running, bent over me. “John? You…”

  “I’m fine,” I said. My eyes wouldn’t focus properly; I saw two of everything. “What the hell did I hit?”

  “A rock,” she said.

  I shook my head. It cleared; I was seeing okay again. I looked at the rock. It was shaped strangely; a solid triangle. It was dark in color, almost black. I got to my feet. My head ached, and I was dizzy, but I stood practically on top of the stone and faced across the slope. I paced off six feet and found a second stone, and six feet farther on, a third. I paced on six more feet and kicked around in the snow, but that seemed to be the end of the rank. I went back to the third one and paced down eight feet. I found a stone. I paced below that and found nothing. I went back up and went across the slope, below the second stone. Eight feet below it was a stone, another five feet below that, another five feet below that, nothing below that. I went back up and kicked around eight feet below the first stone. I found nothing.

  “John,” she said.

  I looked up and saw that she had paced off six feet from the first stone, but in the direction opposite the one I had taken. And she had found a stone. “Go—”

  “I know,” she said. She went on beyond, found nothing, came back and paced down the slope. Eight feet down the slope she found a stone. She paced on, found two more in the file, spaced five feet apart. That seemed to be the end of them.

  “What is this?” she said.

  “Another graveyard,” I said. “Another graveyard right beside the other one.”

  “But why would they put some of the family over here?”

  “Maybe it wasn’t some of the family. Maybe it was something that belonged to the family.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “Yeah,” I said. “They came from Virginia to pioneer, but they brought a little help with them…” but then I realized that didn’t make any sense. “No,” I said. “Not help. They must have decided to go into the breeding business. It’s hard to tell how they did. This woman here had three children that died; there’s no way to tell how many got old enough to sell. This one, well, either all her children lived, or she was a lousy breeder. The other two, probably so-so. You wanted to know about the County; well, here it is. How do you like it? Think I’ve been cheating you out of anything worth mentioning?”

  “Men,” she said.

  “What?”

  “If they were breeding, what about studs?”

  “Oh, that’s no problem; they’re probably over there on the other side of the wall. I mean, why pay good money for a nigger and give him a harem when you can do the work yourself. Anything else you want to know?”

  And I was hoping there was. Because just for a minute I wanted to tell it all to her, tell her all about how Richard Iiames had come with Joseph Powell, grandson of Thomas, brother of John, captain of the Seafoam; for a minute I wanted to watch her face when I told her that. But she didn’t say anything. She just went kicking across the slope, her feet throwing up frenzied clouds of snow. I didn’t say anything, feeling the anger going out of me as she kicked, knowing what she was feeling, what it was like to go that way, searching, not knowing how, or for what. And I knew what it would be like for her when she failed to find anything at all.

  But she didn’t. She didn’t fail. Somewhere down the slope, in line with the two stones in the last file, she found another one. I heard her suck her breath in when her foot hit it, but she did not cry out; she just sucked her breath in and stood, panting, looking down. And then she looked up at me. She glared at me, angrily. Then she came back up the slope, stood beside me.

  “What about that marker down there?” she said.

  “Probably a man,” I said. I looked down over the valley, watched as the wind kicked up more snow, and braced myself for the blast that would come in a minute when the cold gust reached us. But as I shivered, the number of them came to me: one man, four women, seven children; twelve.

  “I was wrong,” I said. “They weren’t breeding stock.”

  She looked at me. “What were they doing here, then?”

  “Dying,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  We were halfway up the slope when she caught her foot and stumbled. As I helped her up I saw that she had stumbled on another marker. It was like the others, the same size and shape, and it had nothing written on it, but it was not in the pattern at all, it was above it, closer to the southea
st corner of the Iiames family plot, almost exactly where he would have been when he killed himself.

  “Somebody marked his death,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said, and went on, not wanting to tell her it wasn’t a death that somebody had marked, it was only a grave.

  197903121800 (Monday)

  THE STORM WAS IN ITS FINAL PHASE. The south wind had gone, had taken with it the moisture and the clouds. Now the sky was clear and black, the air crisp and dry and cold as steel. Now the west wind blew. I knew it was the west wind—I could hear it singing.

  That was what I had called it when I was a child; that was what it had sounded like to me. And that was what I had believed it was, even though nobody else thought it sounded like singing, not even Old Jack. He had claimed it was the souls of the Indians who lived and died in the mountains, long before the white man came, panting as they ran in pursuit of deer and bear and catamount in their hunting grounds beyond the grave. But he had never argued with my interpretation. Because it was not the kind of thing you could argue about. He heard panting, I heard singing; we both heard something, and believed what we wanted to believe.

  Eventually there had come a time when I had not needed legends to explain it. I had been in my last year of high school then, studying physics, and I read in my textbook how the passage of a gas over an irregular surface sets up vibrations, the frequency of which varies in direct proportion to something, and in inverse proportion to something else, and I had realized that the sound I called the singing of the wind was not singing at all, or panting, either; that it was just a sound, like a car honking; that if you knew the shape of the land and the velocity and temperature and direction of the wind, you could sit there with your slide rule and come up with a pretty good idea of what the pitch would be. It was something that you didn’t have to believe in; it was something you could know. And so I had copied down the equations in my notebook and I had waited anxiously for the first of the winter storms, and when the snow had fallen and the sky was clearing, I had gone to the far side to sit with Old Jack and drink toddies and listen to the sound the wind made and to glory in the power of knowing what it was. I had told him what I had learned and he had looked at me blankly, and shaken his head and said he didn’t give a damn about what the book said; it was the souls of Indians. And I had realized for the first time that even though I loved him, he was an ignorant old man, no better than the savages who thought that thunder was the sound of some god’s anger, and for the first time, I had argued with him about it. But then it had started, and I had left off arguing to listen. And what I had heard had filled me with cold fear. For I had not heard a sound like a car honking; I had not heard vibrations of a frequency that varied directly or inversely with anything at all; I had heard singing. I had sat there, clutching my toddy, trying to perceive that sound as I had known I should, trying not to hear voices in it, trying not to hear words. But I had heard them anyway.