In the Fall

by Jeffrey Lent

  IN THE FALL

  IN THE FALL

  Jeffrey Lent

  Copyright © 2000 by Jeffrey Lent

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  All characters, locations, and situations are products of imagination or are used fictitiously. While effort has been made to adhere to historical record, events and geography may have been altered for narrative texture.

  The “Mother-in-Law” song comes from Songs of Old Vermont, by the late Harold Harrington of North Pomfret, Vermont, and was released on Droll Yankees records.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Lent, Jeffrey.

  In the fall: a novel / by Jeffrey Lent,

  p. cm.

  eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9651-4

  1. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Veterans—Vermont

  Fiction. 2. Afro-Americans—Vermont Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3562.E493415 1999

  813′.54—dc2I 99-30862

  CIP

  DESIGN BY LAURA HAMMOND HOUGH

  Atlantic Monthly Press

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  for Marion the sweet long road

  And for their unstinting support and enthusiasm,

  Michael Hill and Holley Bishop

  Prologue

  The boy woke in the dark house and knew he was alone. It was knowing this that woke him. The house was not empty, he just was alone in it. He stood and dressed and went down through the house in the dark. From the kitchen, he could see the lantern light past the overgrown pasture beyond the barn. He took his jacket from the peg and held the door to settle it back into the frame without noise. Under the big hemlocks and tamaracks surrounding the house, he crossed the soft dirt track of the drive and stepped into the tangle of sumac and blackberries and young popples, keeping a clump of sumac between him and the light. He was not afraid of the dark. He was afraid of being in the house. The lantern sat on an upturned stone. His father was digging with a spade in the woods floor, piling the soil he lifted onto a canvas tarp laid next to the hole he was making. The boy heard the soft noise of dirt slipping off the spade. The hole was round, not wide but deep. His father worked carefully, prying free stones, small rocks, with the tip of the blade. When the handle disappeared halfway into the ground his father stopped, set down the spade and from the edge of the tarp took up one of three coffee cans and got down on his knees to position it in the bottom of the hole. Still on his knees, he packed handfuls of dirt around the can and only when it was covered did he rise to finish the job. He worked slowly, transferring the soil from the tarp back to the hole. When he was done, he tamped the soil with the flat of the blade, the sound gentle blows in the night. He set aside the spade and shook the tarp for the last traces of dirt and then took up a metal-tined rake and pulled the leaves and understory trash back over the hole, raking back and forth until he was satisfied with his job. Then he moved a short distance in the woods, the boy moving with him, a soft unwatched dance within the thicket. He watched as his father dug another hole, the same careful job as the first, another small grave for a coffee can. And when this was done, they both moved again and one more hole was dug and filled and finished, covered over, hidden. When his father was done, he sat on a stone, lighted a cigarette and smoked it. The boy watched, knowing he had to get back to the house before his father but only wanting enough time and no more. The cigarette tip made an orange flare in the dark as his father inhaled and the release of smoke from his lungs would come float through the brush where the boy stood and he’d breathe in all he could—as if it were his father’s presence. The night after his little sister died and his mother still lay sick his father had sent him to bed but it had been his mother that woke him, standing at the foot of his bed with the girl held by the hand, his mother saying nothing but watching him while Claire waved to him. It was not long after this that his father came up the stairs to send the boy out with a lantern to shovel snow from the drive out through the hemlocks to the road, shoveling uselessly against the four-foot snowfall, crying as he worked, raging in an effort he already knew was for nothing. When his father came into the brittle orange and purple dawn to stop him, to still his shovel, to tell him his mother was dead, even then he would not stop, but dug at the snow as if into his own bursting heart. Seeing the two of them together, side by side in his room. A silent farewell. His mother and sister had come to him on their way out of the house to view him once more. This was enough then to be scared of being alone in the house. It was not the dark. He had no fear of the dark outside.

  His father ground the cigarette against the sides of his trousers, broke the butt apart and scattered it, and still the boy waited. Then his father took up the tarp and passed it through his hands along one edge until he held the corners and draped it down before him, his arms spread wide. For a moment the tarp hid both father and lantern—a screen over the scene, the tarp backlit from the lantern—and then his father brought the corners together and folded the tarp against the length of his body, placed it under one arm and reached down with the other to gather up the rake and shovel. It was time to go. His father took up the lantern as the boy turned back to the house, moving swiftly through the dark, the house a blank silhouette against the night sky. He heard his father behind him, his wind a ragged suck as if he pulled himself forward by drawing in the air—his lungs still weak with the winter’s influenza which he’d carried into the house but risen from, just when Claire had sickened with it and then their mother. They did not have it near as long as his father but both drowned in it. The boy had not been sick at all. With the noise his father was making he guessed he could have run, and not been seen or heard, but he wanted nothing more than just to beat his father back to the house. To lie in bed and hear him come in.

  Whatever was in the coffee cans, whatever was buried in the woods behind him, he did not know. Something secret laid away, something hidden deep now in the earth, out of sight, gone. Without ever having once been told, he knew it was his father’s business buried out there, not his. Curious as any boy, he still knew to leave it be.

  Part I

  Randolph

  One

  The boy’s grandfather came down off the hill farm above the Bethel road south of Randolph early in the summer of 1862, leaving behind his mother and the youngest girl still at home along with a dwindling flock of Merino sheep and a slowly building herd of milk cows. Norman Pelham was barely seventeen, but he was well built in his homemade fine-stitched suit of clothes. His silent manner and extra height deflected any question of his age. His father drove him in the wagon and neither spoke during the hour trip to the depot in Randolph. The summer dust rose up through the trace chains and settled on the braided bobs of the team’s tails. Norman was a serious youth who doubted that the secession of near half the states in the union would be quickly resolved. Still, his death seemed remote and unlikely. He planned to do his part as well as he could, but no hero’s blood pumped through his veins. He had no desire for glory beyond traveling back up that same road one day. But he did not speak with his father of these things and his father offered nothing of his own fears that morning. Instead they tracke
d the course of crows over the valley and watched as men they knew worked at the first cutting of hay in the broad flat fields along the river. Some of those men rested their scythes to lift a hat or arm in greeting, some had sons already at the depot or in Brattleboro and some would soon follow. Father and son would incline their heads to the greetings with no need for words, for all knew their destination. They rode on to the strained creak of harness leather above the heavy wheels crumbling the road dust, the father’s heart clattering as if loosed from a pivot in his chest and the heart of the boy also in fearsome ratchet. There had been no argument between them, no discussions of fitness or age. The father would have gone himself but could not. The boy was not going in his place. The boy was going on his own.

  In Randolph, they drew the team up away from the depot and backed the wagon around so it was headed home. The team stood with dropped heads, sweat lather foaming around their backpads. The father wrapped the lines once in a loose loop around the brake lever and stepped down out of the wagon. Norman climbed down the other side and reached behind to lift out a valise with twin straps that held a winter coat, canvas pants, a boiled white shirt, a small inscribed Bible, extra socks and a razor. All but the razor had been brought at his mother’s urging. Norman had planned to carry the razor in his pocket, confident he could always find a strop and soap of some kind. He thought the army might even provide these things. He didn’t know; there was no one to ask.

  There was a crowd around the depot, which was strung with homemade bunting. His father reached out, took his hand, and they both grasped hard, then dropped the other’s hand at the same moment, as if from long practice.

  “Well,” his father said, his eyes drifting over the wagonbed toward the team.

  “Keep an eye on my sheep,” Norman said.

  “Yuht,” his father said. And then added, “Dodge them bullets.”

  “I’ll do her.”

  His father nodded. “I’ll get on to home then.”

  Norman raised the valise and held it against his back, with his elbow in the air. He echoed his father. “Yuht.” As he turned away and walked toward the crowd, he realized for the first time that he would be around far more people than he was used to, yet knew all he needed to do was keep quiet and he could be as alone as he liked.

  He rode the train south to Brattleboro for the rest of the day. Around him, men were eating food out of sacks or bound-up in cloth. Norman opened the valise, intent upon retrieving the razor and leaving the rest behind him, and found there on top a piece of cold mutton, tied up in paper and string, and a loaf of new bread along with a half dozen hard-boiled eggs. As he peeled the shells off the eggs, he thought of her egg money going with him. After he ate all the mutton and bread, he closed the valise and kept it held tight between his feet, razor and all.

  In Brattleboro the next morning he signed the muster rolls and was issued a uniform and gun as well as a dozen or more other related items. He lived in a tent with five other men from rare and unknown parts of Vermont and went through a couple of weeks of drills and simple training that struck him as having little to do with anything at all. He learned over time that he was fortunate in having officers who were neither ambitious nor career men, but who had age and experience. In early July, they rode trains south and joined the thronged mass of the Army of the Potomac. Norman now carried only his razor in one pocket and his small Bible in another. He’d saved also his extra socks.

  It was late September of 1865 before he passed through Bethel on his way back to the hill farm, months after his fellow members of the 2nd Vermont had returned in pairs or small groups. Although word of him had spread beyond that group of veterans, they would not speak of him; any of them who were approached by his mother would only assure her he’d be along any day and last they’d seen him he was fine. There were still those few whose eyes rose over whatever length of road they could see from time to time to see if the figure in the distance was him. Some among them even doubted he’d come at all, but even those doubts were less of a judgment than a curiosity. They were not the sort of men to place themselves in another’s shoes and would not voice an opinion unless the matter bore directly upon them. And this with Norman did not. Still, they watched the road.

  So they saw him pass along the road that Indian-summer morning with the sugarbush maples flaring on the hillsides and the hilltop sheep pastures overgrown with young cherry and maple. Word ran along the road ahead of him so near all his neighbors and townspeople saw him walking in the long easy stride of one who counted walking in months and years not miles, a rucksack cut from an issue blanket strapped to his back and by his side a girl near his own height in a sunfaded blue dress and carrying her own cardboard suitcase bound with rough twine. Norman wore his army brogans while the girl walked barefoot in the dust, her own pair of wornout boots tied together by the laces and slung over one shoulder. Norman raised his hand to greet those he saw and most nodded or waved back. And those that hung back in barn doorways or stood behind curtains he paid no attention to, satisfied to pass them by and telling himself he held no malice to those who ignored him. At one point the girl said to him, “They watching us.”

  “They been watching us all along the way.”

  “They has been. But these your folks.”

  “All they got is the right to look.”

  “Maybe.”

  “No maybe about it,” he said. “They can look all they want and think what they like, it don’t matter to me and it don’t matter to you.” And he meant what he said; he’d walked through any fear he might be wrong back in southern Virginia. There was nothing cocksure or militant in how he felt, just his own certainty at having settled his fears and doubts. If there was any hesitation left in him it came from his great tenderness for her, his knowledge of the cruelty a person may inflict upon another and his determination to shield her from any damage that his own people might cast upon her. He was not simple in love but ferocious with it.

  They turned off the road less than a mile from Randolph village to climb the half mile of gravel track to the hill farm where only his mother and youngest sister now waited, his father kicked in the head by the old mare as he bent to pick up a dropped dime two years before. The letter with this news had reached him just days before the battle of Fredericksburg in which men died before, beside and twice behind him as his body recalled his father’s advice and he dropped in a long swivel from his knees to rise again with the breech-loading Springfield coming up before him. His older sisters married and gone, Miriam on a farm in Iowa, Ethel to a paper-goods man out of St. Louis. As he and the girl passed the final house along the way, the farm wife was in the side yard stringing laundry, with her arms full and her mouth agape with pins, and so was unable to wave or call greeting but just watched them pass by, the neighbor boy grown war-hardened and the green-eyed girl with her African body so lovely in the fall sunshine, her skin the color and luster of hand-rubbed heartpine. Norman called out and the girl raised a hand in a gesture the woman read as saying You’re over there and I’m over here and I’m going to stay right here unless you invite me otherwise. As they continued on up the hill, Norman thought he heard the soft spatter of clothespins falling into the grass behind them.

  He was wounded twice. The first time was at Gettysburg when the 2nd Vermont found the breach in the flank of Pickett’s fated charge and waded in to turn the battle, charging across the field through the offal of dead and dying men and horses, the siren of battle at full crescendo. Norman was wounded as a red-eyed cavalryman swept through them with his sabre flaring in the dying summer light and sliced Norman’s right arm deep to the bone and the sabre flew up from the blow and was coming down again. Norman had dropped his Springfield but raised his left arm as he threw his body against the man’s horse behind the long blade and drew the man down on top of him, knocking the wind from himself and leaving it to others to drag the rebel man from Norman and run bayonets through him. They saved the sabre and presented it to him when he
returned to the company from the hospital at Lee’s old home outside Washington but he did not want it, still able to feel the sweat coming from the cavalryman’s mustache and chin as he came down on him, still able to smell his glaze of fear and death as they struck the earth and the sky darkened with the bodies of his comrades closing over them.

  The second wound came almost two years later outside Richmond after that city fell and Lee’s army was crumbling before them. It was late in the day when the company crossed a small stream with the dogwoods blooming and the few spring leaves on the trees fine and pale, the size of mouse ears. The men they were pursuing had gained enough ground to turn their one fieldpiece upon the 2nd and fire off a final canister of grapeshot that blew apart a dozen feet from where he crouched with the others in poison ivy and trout lilies, hearing the whistle of the grape coming in. While the shell fell short, it sent something hard through the air, a piece of tree perhaps, which struck Norman in the head, tore apart his left ear and left him unconscious and alone while the company camped around him. Sometime during the night he woke and, still senseless, crawled off in the manner of a sick animal seeking better shelter in which to die. He awoke in mighty pain at dawn next to a hedgerow somewhere in Virginia, his ear a throbbing thing attached to him and his brain ill and scattered, shivering with the dew already burning off before the rising sun and his tongue thick with wanting water. He’d rolled onto his good side to keep his ear in the air and away from the ground. He slept some like that and waking again saw a girl squatting there beside him, her face serious as death itself and her hands cupping a dipper gourd of water as she asked him, “Is you dead?”

  He lay there etching her against the pan of his brain: the fine raised cheekbones that brought all focus of her face to her wide eyes already bright before the sun added light to them. The fine cleft chin he wanted to hold as an apple and the lips cracked with her own fearsome journey and still lovely as if chiseled from a piece of veined rose marble. Still he could barely speak from pain but felt he must or she would flee, thinking him dead or somehow dangerous, and so he said, “I just need to lay here a bit.” Then, his head and ear booming, he asked, “Is that water you got there?”