The Reservoir

by John Milliken Thompson

  • CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT •

  IN THE AFTERNOON Willie collects the body of his brother, but he will not lift the black silk hood to look at his face. He watches the undertaker nail the lid on the coffin and helps him load it into the hired carriage.

  Aunt Jane has already had a hole dug out beside her husband, and the following day Willie and Lewis lower the box on ropes. Reverend Ryland refused to come read from the Bible on account of the damage it might do to his reputation in neighboring counties, so Willie does the reading himself. It’s just Aunt Jane, Lewis, Maria, his parents, and himself. His mother throws in a sprig of holly with red berries, but can’t bring herself to say anything. Nor can Willie say anything other than the words written on the page.

  And then he has a pressing matter to attend to over in Manquin with Mr. Howard Madison. Perhaps he should have already attended to it, but now it’s urgent. He goes horseback to the Clifton ferry, crosses the river, then heads up the road to the Madison place. He wants to sing to honor his brother, like the Powhatan of long ago, but his voice quakes—he doesn’t have his brother’s talent. There is no promise of spring on this still, gray day of bare trees, no heat nor movement except that of small birds in the thickets by the sides of the road. The horse moves steadily along, one mile after another.

  The Madison place is as it has always been, the house bearing loose scabs of whitewash, the porch sagging into a hideous grin, skirts of weeds around the outbuildings. A muddy boy is crawling beneath the house (black or white, Willie can’t discern), and the odor of rancid meat is everywhere on the property, as though it were a charnel house. Steaming vats of bluing indicate there is at least a woman who cares about clean laundry.

  Willie hears a rhythmic thumping over in the barn and turns his horse that direction. To the left of the building a slit-open hog hangs by its heels from a tree, its guts cooling on a table beside a greasy, foot-long meat cleaver. A scraper lies on the ground beneath the hog, whose bristly neck suggests the task has been simply too much bother. A kettle of boiling water stands off to the side, though, Willie thinks, still a little too close to the barn.

  He slides down and steps into the dusty gloom. The smell of moldy hay strikes him. The barn is a chaos of ill-kempt equipment and random feedbags tucked wherever space is available. From one wall peg hangs a halter, from which depends a sickle. On a workbench lies an assortment of tinsnips, mallets, a sawed-off grubbing hoe, and a coffee grinder. A rabbit gum is suspended by twine from the hayloft—to preserve space? Or did Madison believe he could catch flying rabbits in his barn? There is no rhyme nor reason to any of it as far as Willie can fathom. In one corner is a John Deere grain binder, or a rusting carcass that once represented such a machine. Perhaps Madison bought it secondhand thinking to fix it up, but at any rate there he is thrashing grain on a low platform with a grain flail. At this kind of work, he is quite expert for an old man, raising the staff so that the thongs flick the stick back, then forward, letting the stick land with a punishing smack against the stalks. Over and over, grunting each time it lands.

  He stops suddenly and jerks around. “Cain’t hear good no more,” he says. He turns back to finish the pile he’s working on. After a few strokes, he pauses. “Thresher’s broke,” he says, “but this does just as good for the horses. Used to have a nigger to do it, now I just pretend I’m beating that selfsame nigger.” He laughs and works with renewed energy.

  Madison is not one to appreciate the subtleties of a thoughtful gesture, and yet he knows when he is being challenged. He has developed an instinct for it, just as he knows when it is time to kill a hog that has gotten too ornery, same with a dog. He’ll say, “Mr. Hog I’ve took all the shit from you I’m gonna take. I’m going up to the house for my gun.” And the hog will know that something is different and trot away with a grumble across the mud and up against the slats of its pen, its snout pushed out, and regard the man walking with the long stick in his hand and a crazy happiness on his face. Madison will take his time, letting the hog trot from one side to the other; he is too old to turn it out into the pasture the way he used to—he’s liable to slip in his excitement.

  When he is done with his grain pile he turns around. He spits, frowns. “What can I do for you, Mr. Cluverius?” He wears a long-sleeved out-at-elbows undershirt and baggy overalls held up by one suspender and stuffed into an ancient pair of brown riding boots. His thin fringe of hair hangs to his neck, a week-old beard hiding caved-in cheeks. The one thing not disheveled about him, Willie observes for the first time, is his strength—from his thick neck down to his trunk he looks to be a mean and unbending thing of muscle.

  “I came to ask why you lied about my brother.”

  He regards Willie with red-rimmed eyes that are heavy, milky, and unmoving. His face is downturned, made of melted wax and years of rage. “I didn’t lie and I’ll thank you to get off my property.”

  “You got up in the witness box and swore before God that Lillie told you she was carrying Tommie’s baby. I know that’s a lie. I just want to hear you say it, and then I’ll go away.”

  “Say it for what?” Madison tightens his grip on the flail, his neck going to cords.

  “Because I want you to. You started this, and now you’re going to end it. I know you won’t apologize, I just want to hear you say you put your hand on the Bible and lied to God.”

  “I won’t do any such a thing.”

  “She didn’t speak more than two words to you the last years of her life.”

  “Why, you boy. You’re just a nothing. I won’t do anything for you. You and your people are trash. Your aunt Jane with her nose in the air thinking she’s too good to give me a nod nor a grin. She ruined that girl, and you and your brother too. Your mother’s a four o’clock drunk. But, your daddy now. He’s good for something. For making words come out of his mouth all day long, and none of them add up to more than a pile of hog’s innards. Just like out yonder.” He points his flail over Willie’s shoulder to the killing table outside.

  Willie tenses his jaw, his hands flexing of their own accord. He tries to think how it is that people like Madison come to be in this world. He wants to jump on him, to beat him until he takes back what he has said, and he feels himself leaning forward on the balls of his feet.

  The restraint seems unnoticed by Madison. “Your brother got what he deserved,” he says. “ ’Cept I wished I could’ve done it myself. You wasn’t there so I’ll tell you how it went.”

  “You won’t say another word to me as long as you live. I promise you that.” He stares hard at Madison, who returns the look with flat, uncomprehending eyes. Willie turns then and begins walking back to his horse.

  “What was it you wanted to promise me, boy?” Madison says. His breath comes out in hard bursts, turning to mist in the cold air. He raises the flail and brings it down, whizzing in front of Willie’s face and torso.

  “She wasn’t your property to do with as you pleased,” Willie says.

  “You shut your mouth, boy.”

  Tears are now sliding down Willie’s cheeks as he backs away, stumbling. “You think you’re above the law,” he says. “You think the law doesn’t apply to you.”

  “Who are you talking about?” As Madison lunges, Willie trips and nearly falls. All he can do is watch as Madison steps forward, his Adam’s apple pulsing like a blind animal trying to free itself. “Your brother choked to death. Rope didn’t break his neck. He strangled, died gasping for breath. It was right fitting.”

  Before Madison can raise the flail again, Willie bursts upon him and catches him in a bear grip. Madison manages to get his arms around Willie’s, and they struggle, trying to unbalance each other. Willie is stronger, but Madison has more heft to him, and he is using it to try to maneuver Willie toward the boiling kettle. They go lurching up against the hot iron rim, scattering coals with their feet, Madison trying to force Willie over into the water. The rim is nearly waist high and the effort to side-bend Willie is sapping Madison�
�s strength.

  But the fight begins to turn on experience, and despite Willie’s youth and years of working in the woods he cannot equal Madison’s penchant for bitter struggle. Madison grappled hand to hand for his life on more than one occasion during the war, and it comes back naturally to him. Yet Willie is able to twist Madison around to his weaker left side until they bang into the killing table, then fall scrabbling to the ground. Madison is now able to get his hands around Willie’s throat, and Willie cannot dislodge them. The meat cleaver spins on the rattling, grease-slick table and falls on the ground. Willie sees it. His hand reaches out and takes it, like a tool, with the business end toward Madison’s head.

  In an instant Willie can see where it is going: the blade landing neat along the temple and jawline, cleaving meat and bone, the rivulets of blood darkening the cruel Adam’s apple as it bobs one last time, blood raining on the ground as Madison falls in a ruined heap, half his face torn away. As the blade swings through the air, Willie twists it so that it slaps flat as an iron skillet against Madison’s cheek. The man falls away insensate, his features gone suddenly gentle as a child’s, his breath blown back into him like a corpse restored. Willie gets up and drops the cleaver and brushes himself off, stunned by what has just unfolded. He regards the crumpled figure of Madison, lying on his side.

  “Is he dead?” says a woman’s voice.

  Willie looks up and sees Mrs. Madison standing on the side steps, a little girl peering from behind her apron.

  “No,” Willie says, “just stunned.” He looks at Madison again, sees his chest rise and fall; he feels his own lungs filling and refilling.

  Mrs. Madison nods, her dimpled chin tucking up toward a permanently downturned mouth. “Well—,” she replies. Her faded brown hair has come loose and falls across her cheek. She bears a strong resemblance to Lillie—she’s small like Lillie, but stouter and beaten down, her eyes showing fear. She steps to the ground, her arms crossed. “What made him to come after you that a-way?” she says.

  “Cousin Hannah?” Willie says. “Do you recognize me?”

  “You’re Aunt Eliza’s older boy, Willie Cluverius.”

  Willie nods. He starts to tell her what happened, but she cuts in, “You don’t have to tell me. I saw it.” The girl comes from around her mother now. She has long limp brown hair, a small face, and wide dark eyes that study him—she looks even more like Lillie than her mother does. Willie cannot keep from staring at her.

  “I don’t know what you came for,” Mrs. Cluverius tells him, “but I know you didn’t ought to be attacked. You’ve had your share of misery.”

  Willie waits a minute, then ventures, “You and my ma were close at one time. You wrote letters and such.”

  “We still do from time to time.”

  Willie tucks his lower lip into his teeth. He tries to think how to frame the question.

  Hannah is looking thoughtfully at her prostrate husband. “He’s not much of a man, my husband,” she says, sniffing in and pulling herself erect for the first time in years. “Something’s not right about him. I don’t know how to describe it.”

  “You don’t have to,” Willie says. He doesn’t want to hear any more. Faith alone, he thinks—the not-knowing rather than the knowing. He wants to say something that he only partly understands—that it doesn’t matter what he believes, that the only thing you can count on in faith, as in love, is that the ground is going to shift under you, just like it does on the shore. But they would be sure to misunderstand.

  Madison tries to mumble something, saliva oozing from his cracked lips, his bruised and swelling jaw unable to work. A rooster crows off in the yard, then stops mid-cry for some reason known only in the world of roosters.

  “I came here to ask him a question,” Willie says, “though he couldn’t answer me.”

  “He don’t answer to nobody, not even to—” Mrs. Madison clamps her lips together as she glances up, then over to her husband, who begins trying to right himself, getting on all fours.

  “I’mon kill you, boy,” Madison croaks. His heavy eyes open slowly, then close, then open again. He makes another attempt to move, but his limbs will not coordinate themselves, and all he can do is make another feeble threat, mewling in incoherent, impotent fury.

  Willie regards the girl—he has not seen her in years and cannot think of her name. “Cousin Hannah,” he says, “you send your girl around to Aunt Jane and me if you want. We’d be proud to look after her schooling and such.” Mrs. Madison nods briefly, glances at her husband. “It wouldn’t be a bother,” Willie goes on. “Jane gets lonely, you see, she likes young people around.” He stands there looking at Mrs. Madison and her daughter, watching them as their eyes dart beyond him and grow suddenly large. A moment stretches into perfect stillness, and no act of violence or reconcilement can unbalance it. Willie turns and sees Madison, grasping the cleaver, rise to his knees, his eyes trained on Willie’s midsection and, at the same time, on something so distant that Willie could think on it for the rest of his life and never know what it was.

  Madison sees his daughter’s accusing eyes. His single overalls strap has broken so that the bib hangs below his waist, his dirt-smeared, sagging undershirt revealing the pale breast of an old man. He tries to say something to Willie, but his jaw is locked, his throat a dry streambed. He drops the cleaver.

  Willie turns to his cousin. “I’d best be leaving if I’m to catch the ferry.” He picks up his hat where it fell, slaps it on his thigh, and mounts his horse. “Good-bye,” he says, lifting his hat for Hannah, the same hat Tommie wore that day in Richmond—a gray slouch hat with a tear in the crown. He rides slowly up the hard-packed dirt of the drive, its stripe of high grass leading him out to the road. “Come back here,” Madison says, his voice hollow, gone to nothing but wind along the ground.

  The smell of wood smoke and green cedar bites through the cold of a January afternoon. A little farther down the road and he finds he does feel like singing after all. He wets his lips, and softly, jostling along, he hums songs he remembers his brother singing.

  After a while the cloud cover begins lifting, the sun edging out of the western sky, and he sees what looks like a formation of geese. But as he watches it grow closer, he realizes it’s a balloon. It’s the strangest thing he has ever seen in his life. A balloon in King William County—who would have thought? It grows larger, a giant sea-green teardrop, and he can see people in the wicker basket, waving their hats. He waves back as they go silently floating over the trees, riding beneath their own world. How strange life is, how filled with wonder and amazement. “Did you see that, Tommie?” he says. “Damnedest thing. I miss you, brother. God be with you.”

  He looks up and beholds at the edge of the clouds the deepest blue sky he has ever seen, with the evening star shining like a little fire in the west. “Till we meet,” he sings quietly, “God be with you till we meet again.” Two brothers gone—it’s just himself now. “The world is upside down, Tommie,” he says, “and I can’t make it any righter.”

  He pushes his horse into a trot. With luck he’ll be home in time for a late supper.

  A NOTE ON THE SOURCES

  This novel is based on an actual court case, Commonwealth v. Cluverius. A paragraph in a book on Richmond history got me digging deeper. I found copious newsprint dedicated to what became a sensational trial; it was wonderfully detailed, but it gave no clear idea of who the participants were, where they had come from, and why they ended up doing what they did.

  I continued to dig up as much as I could about the case, while doing general research on the period. Though most of Richmond’s early buildings have fallen to the wrecking ball, a good sample from various periods remains. Finding Lillian’s grave early on—which took more effort than I’d thought it would—gave me a tangible link to the story and made me feel committed to telling it with as much passion and honesty as I could.

  I soon realized that I was going to have to imagine most of the story. By this point I fe
lt so connected to these long-dead people that I thought I owed it to them to get it right, which in fictional terms meant that the story would have to rise up out of the facts like a holographic image from a flat screen.

  But the question remained: What was the story? I was lucky in that the events of the case suggested a rough plot line, as all interesting court cases do. There was a real Tommie, Lillian, Willie, Jane Tunstall, Richardson, a shadowy character on whom Nola was based, and so on. In my research I came across key pieces of evidence, carefully preserved for more than a century: letters, photographs, and, most interesting of all, a watch key and a torn note. I integrated much of this into the story, though not always exactly as it appeared in the actual case.

  While I have done my best to keep the novel true to its historical period, I have tailored the facts to suit the story’s dramatic purposes. Most of the pre- and post-trial story is of my own creation. For the trial itself I borrowed freely from the transcripts, employing the standard writer’s tricks of cutting, adding, and moving. Time was collapsed in some places—Tommie, for instance, spent much longer in jail than he does in the novel; the lawyers are composites, and minor characters have been added as necessary; events such as Hatcher’s visits were filled out; and so forth. The details of the case, then, were the fence posts on which I hung the story. The tragic love triangle at its heart was my invention, but it was suggested by the facts.

  As to Tommie’s guilt, the record remains tantalizingly unclear. One can pore through pages of material and be convinced one way, then sift some more another day and completely change one’s mind.

  The following sources were invaluable: The Richmond Dispatch, Chataigne’s Richmond City Directory (1885), Cluverius: My Life, Trial and Conviction by Thomas J. Cluverius (Richmond: S. J. Dudley, 1887), Houses of Old Richmond by Mary Wingfield Scott (Richmond: Valentine Museum, 1941), Old Richmond Neighborhoods by Mary Wingfield Scott(Richmond: Whittet&Shepperson, 1950), Richmond: The Story of a City by Virginius Dabney (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990), Celebrate Richmond edited by Elisabeth Dementi and Wayne Dementi (Richmond: Dietz, 1999), Richmond: A Pictorial History from the Valentine Museum and Dementi Collections edited by Thomas F. Hale (Richmond: Whittet & Shepperson, 1974), American State Trials edited by John D. Lawson (St. Louis: Thomas Law Book, 1936), Along the Trail of the Friendly Years by William E. Hatcher (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1910), John Jasper by William E. Hatcher (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1908), William E. Hatcher by Eldridge B. Hatcher (Richmond: W. C. Hill, 1915), Old Houses of King and Queen County Virginia by Virginia D. Cox and Willie T. Weathers (King and Queen County Historical Society, 1973), Old King William Homes and Families by Peyton Neale Clarke (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing, 1976), The Architecture of Historic Richmond by Paul S. Dulaney (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1968), and General Fitzhugh Lee: A Biography by James L. Nichols (Lynchburg: H. E. Howard, 1989).