The Black Flower Page 10

  Meanwhile the great brick house, no longer serene, suffered through the night. Men died on its polished floors, slipping away unnoticed like diffident guests. Others cried in their pain or muttered private incantations of home. Some waited in terror for their turn at the table when men would pin their arms and the lancet would make its first exquisite penetration and they would try not to scream, even when the surgeon picked up the saw and wiped it on his apron and began to cut. They hoped they would not have to scream. Maybe somebody would come with some morphine or chloroform before their turn came. Maybe they would pass out at the first touch of the knife and not have to hear the sawing. They communicated these hopes to Anna Hereford when she passed, and Anna would say, “Be easy. It will be all right. God is here, He will look after you,” and so on. Stupid words, Anna knew, but the only words she had.

  Anna Margaret Hereford was twenty-four years old, unmarried and likely to remain so, small of build with dark hair cut short and green eyes that seemed, at first glance, too keen, too watchful, and too old for her face. Her eyes were what boys and men noticed first about her, and what women envied most, and it was her eyes that kept them all at whatever distance Anna chose. Her face was thin, a little long of jaw, still a girl’s face though it wouldn’t be for long, and not a hard face yet, though it might be one day. On her right cheek, just across the ridge of her cheekbone, lay an inch-long crescent scar where a pony had kicked her years before; it was a scar, but no man who’d gotten past her eyes had ever thought of it as a flaw.

  Anna was from Lincoln County, ninety miles to the south on the Tennessee line, where she lived with her father (her sister was long married) in a house on the Mulberry Pike. When the Confederate army began its eastward march from Atlanta, Mister James Hereford had sent Anna to her cousins McGavock in Franklin, promising to come himself by and by, though he had no intention of doing so and Anna knew it and there was much heated debate before Anna finally packed her trunks and set out up the muddy roads with an escort of Union cavalry that happened to be going to join Thomas in Nashville. She had come then to her cousins’ great brick house, worried about her immovable papa but glad to see her kinsmen, glad to see the quiet fields and the little river that curled around the village, and glad most of all to be with her cousin Caroline whom she had loved all her days. And now here she was, and if she had felt like smiling she might have smiled at her papa, who had argued that the Rebels were headed for Memphis and the safest place Anna could be in the whole world was the village of Franklin, Tennessee.

  Anna crossed the smoky, dim-lit parlor, weaving among the men crowded there, and gained one of the windows that looked out on the south lawn. She pressed her fingers to the glass, saw her reflection there and points of light that were candles in the room, and the moving shadows of men. This afternoon she had watched through the shutters here as the soldiers formed up in the yard, their tattered flags stirring in the breeze that came with twilight. She had seen them march away rank by rank into the smoke, drums beating, one of their bands playing “Annie Laurie.” And now they were back, but no flags now, and no music. They had been coming in since long before dark, first one then another, then more and more, until they were coming in now by the wagonload it seemed, and there were too many and still they came. There were at least fifty men in this room, and more in the other rooms and on the porch and in the yard and on into the darkness clear to the ends of the earth, and it was easy to imagine the whole earth carpeted with suffering men, piled high with the dead, a vast charnel place lit by fires and dripping torches, where the night itself must go on and on and there would never be another dawn.

  Anna pressed the heels of her hands against her temples and wondered what time it was, and no sooner had she thought it than the parlor clock struck twice. How many hours did that make now? All that time she had followed her cousin Caroline, trying to do as she did, trying to be as strong and as tireless and as gentle—Caroline, who moved among the wreckage with water and bandages, with kindness and infinite patience, touching each man’s life with her hands, her voice, until they began to call for her by name. Only once had Anna seen her cousin fail. A boy had asked her to pull his blanket down, wanted her to tell if it was bad or not as they so often did. Caroline pulled back the blanket, Anna watching, and when her cousin saw what the artillery had done she cried aloud, caught her retching with her own hand, rose and fled while the boy shrieked at the sight of himself, Anna saying over and over “It’s all right it’s all right it’s all right—” When her cousin returned, the boy was dead. Caroline knelt beside him, took his hand, and Anna left her there. Now she was in the parlor, pressing her hands against the hurting in her head, knowing she would not be much use before long.

  As if she had ever been much use, really. It was not the blood, though there was plenty of that—on the floor, on the walls, on the fringes of the drapes, on her own garments, on her hands. It was not the suffering or the sight of wounds or the white ends of shattered bones—she had become used to these things, or numb to them, almost at once, even before she had time to think about it. But she couldn’t do as her cousin did. Watching herself, Anna saw a thing that frightened her more than all the terrible revelations of the night: her own face, cold and graceless, mouthing words she did not believe, wanting to shout Yes, they’ll have to cut—Yes, it’ll hurt—No, I can’t fix it—Oh, God is here all right but all He can do is grieve and suffer too and anyway He won’t listen to me I have tried—

  A bright spear of pain struck her, blinded her for an instant, and when it passed she found herself on the sticky floor beside a boy whose hair was the color of straw. She watched him gather the hem of her dress in his hand. “Go ahead,” she said. The boy looked at her, started to speak. “No,” she said. “We are all in hell, all of us.” Then she leaned her head against the plaster of the parlor wall and began to cry. In a little while, her cousin Caroline found her there, the boy still clinging to the hem of her dress.

  Shortly after two o’clock, a party of musicians from the band of Adams’ Brigade followed the scouts probing the abandoned Federal line. The musicians had been working the field all night as litter bearers and were worn to the edge of madness. They had long since emptied their stomachs, their minds were unwinding like neglected clocks, their bodies were turned to stone. None of them could remember how many men they had borne rearward to the great brick house: a procession of ashen faces, clenched hands, clotted beards, stretching all the way back to sundown when the band was withdrawn from the line and ordered to take up litters. Some of their own had been left very near the point of farthest advance—dead men absurdly clutching their dented brass instruments—and it was these the bandsmen sought now as they followed the scouts forward through the ruins of the army.

  One of those bandsmen who had made it to the Federal works would never be found—not by this party of used up musicians, not the burial details that would come later, nor the crows and vultures, nor even the beetles that were the last and finest gleaners of all.

  Calvin Jones, Professor of Music at the Cumberland Female Academy, was a man born for dim recital halls where dust floated in the twilight and young girls frowned at the fingerboards of their violins. From his youth, Calvin Jones had moved in a world smelling of cork grease, of ink and resin, of the vague, indefinable odor that clings to the inside of instrument cases. Unmarried and unmarriageable, he walked through life in rumpled frock coats and soiled collars, collecting dust, listening for pitch and key even in the songs of birds and the hum of telegraph wires. Calvin Jones had sublimated his whole being to a single illumination: Music, the divine utterance that raised the dark, imperfect souls of men to unimaginable realms, among whose clouds every mean and common thing was transformed. For the Professor, music alone gave order to the universe and shaped, as words could never do, the infinite variations of the soul. Before this cosmic truth the Professor stood in humility and awe. It was the only truth he knew, and the only one he needed—so he thought.

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nbsp; But the world offers too much for any single truth to suffice. For every archangel there is a dragon, and the true artist is one who can embrace them both. Calvin Jones was never prepared for dragons.

  In the spring of the Professor’s fifty-second year, the war arrived. It came as a complete surprise to him; even more surprising was the fact that everyone expected him to have an opinion about it. He formed one soon enough, and it was simple in the extreme: the war had nothing whatever to do with him.

  The events of that first spring and summer of the war seemed to confirm his opinion. His finishing students performed as always on the lawn of the Academy, received their diplomas under the elms, and went away into the world. In June, following his usual custom, Professor Jones went to New Orleans by steamboat and heard the symphony. That September the Academy opened to fewer students but opened nevertheless, and the Professor once again moved with his baton and sheet music among the bright faces. The winter passed, as it always did, and spring came again.

  It was an April afternoon of almost unbearable softness. The tall windows of the music room were thrown open to the air, to the white blur of dogwoods and the breath of the warming earth. Professor Jones was lecturing on vocal combinations, particularly the pact duets in Verdi. His audience, ten young ladies of good family, ignored him; it was spring, their minds were full of other things. If the Professor understood this, he gave no sign. Then the Sexton knocked timidly on the door: Headmaster sends his compliments, Sir, and would the Professor kindly suspend his class and bring them out to the Oxford road?

  The girls fled rejoicing into the sunlight. Professor Jones was puzzled; it was an extraordinary request, and at the very moment when he was about to make a point about La Forza del Destino that would weigh heavily on the final examination. He followed the girls outside, his lecture notes still in his hand.

  The fenced greensward of the Academy bordered the Oxford road for the space of a hundred yards. Professor Jones was astonished to find the entire population of the school gathered along the fence: the girls, demure in their spring frocks, chattering like robins and bending to admire the yellow daffodils in the grass; the faculty in a somber cavil of clawhammer coats and beards and watch chains. In the road young Prince Rupert, the Headmaster’s negro boy, was dancing a pigeon-wing to the time of his uncle the groundskeeper’s jews-harp. Singular indeed, thought the Professor. There was nothing else in the road but the sunshine and the dust raised by the negro’s bare feet.

  “What is all this?” asked the Professor of young Fitter, a mathematics instructor whose enthusiasms always made the Professor uneasy. Fitter laughed. His hat was pushed back on his sandy head and a daffodil nodded in his buttonhole. “Ah, Professor, you are too much by half,” the young man said. “Perhaps you are the only white man in the state don’t know we have had a great battle up in Tennessee and emerged victorious.”

  “We?” the Professor queried. “We have?”

  “Well, yes,” said the young man. “Who else do you suppose? But look—yonder they come!” With that, Fitter ran to the fence, where everyone was waving handkerchiefs and talking at once. The Professor, left alone on the green, turned and peered up the road.

  A band of horsemen was approaching in column-of-fours, the van, so the Professor surmised, of the army come from the late victory in Tennessee. He observed that they sat their horses with an easy arrogance; he noted an interesting atonal quality in the clank and jingle of their accoutrements. But the Professor, whose vision of an army had been formed years before while observing Her Majesty’s Household Cavalry in review, could not reconcile the appearance of these men. If these were light horse (a term he recalled from a news dispatch out of the Crimea; remembered it because it had a pleasing sound), then why, he asked himself—for there was no one else to ask—did they so resemble a band of farmers? And why, if victorious, were they moving south when the enemy, as he understood it, was at the north?

  The very fact that he was moved to wonder these things disturbed him. His thoughts drifted back to the empty music room where, only moments before, the world had stood in perfect order. He felt an unsettling nostalgia for the place, as if it already belonged to the unattainable past. Ridiculous, he chided himself. Reality lay there, not here; this foolishness on the road was ephemeral, a momentary distraction that would last only so long as it took the dust to settle on the roadside leaves. Let the young men laugh, let the girls wave their handkerchiefs in the sunlight. For himself, Calvin Jones would make his place among reliable truths, and there he would await them. The Professor took a last look up the road, shook his head, and turned back to the Academy. He was a little way across the green when the people began to cheer.

  The sound grabbed him, held him fast. The April afternoon leapt upward on those jubilant voices, high above the long procession of afternoons that made the life of Calvin Jones, and through the bars of sunlight in the elms the Professor caught a glimpse of something outside himself, terrible and exhilarating and divine. He opened his hands, his lecture notes floated down to the grass like leaves.

  Then he was at the fence with the others among the voices and waving hats and fluttering handkerchiefs. The horsemen were abreast of the Academy gates now and the Professor could see them clearly, and all at once a strange sympathy grew in his heart. He gripped the fence rail, watching.

  Young men they were, with brown, lean faces, and they laughed at the girls among the daffodils who stretched their white arms toward the horses’ necks. The boys turned in their saddles, bowed, doffed their hats, while their mean-looking horses danced with excitement and fought their martingales. They did indeed look like farmers, in their slouch hats and short brown jackets (some in their shirtsleeves), and their boots and jeans trousers, and it might have been a fox hunt, not a battle, they’d been to. But these were no farmers. They were caked and spattered with dried mud, even to their blanket rolls and saddlebags, and powdered with the dust of the road. Some carried cut-down shotguns, some carbines in slings or held with the butt pressed against a thigh; all bristled with revolvers, each had a saber strapped to his saddle skirt. Confederate light horse they were—filthy, raffish, and dangerous—and they filled the bright afternoon with the stink of violence and death, and if the girls loved them it was because they did not know. But the Professor knew, and was drawn to them still. He found himself wanting to touch the horses’ necks, wanting to go out in the road and press his hands against the horses’ sweaty flanks and touch the boots of the boys who rode them and follow down the long road to whatever mystery awaited them.

  As the last of the cavalrymen passed on toward the Cumberland square, Professor Jones bowed his head in shame and wonder. It took an effort of will to loose his hands from the fence rail and turn away. Then, having turned, he could not think of where to go. He looked about, as if there lay hidden in the sunlight and the elms and the buildings of the Academy some compass that would guide him—but there was nothing. Then he caught a glimpse of memory, like a bright light behind a halfopen door:

  At twilight on Ash Wednesday, the huddled bells awoke; they pealed and clamored over the town, sending vast flocks of pigeons aloft to reel against the sky. Inside Canterbury the bells echoed in powerful resonation like the voice of God, and the young Calvin Jones made his way to the altar rail where the Archbishop waited, and the ashes—

  Then it was gone—the image, the memory, whatever it was—and Professor Jones stood on the green of the Academy and thought Ridiculous, ridiculous, that was too long ago and took out his handkerchief and mopped his face while the young people chattered behind him. The young, how lucky they were, how little they knew of what it meant to be alone, to be poor, to be afraid—

  “Bah!” he spat, and shoved his handkerchief angrily into his sleeve. Professor Jones had been trained at the Royal Academy, it was where he first shaped the truths that guided him, and if he had been poor and lonely and afraid what had that to do with the spring of his fifty-second year and a band of armed children
passing in the road? Hah—the remote absurdity of youth. He was glad to be rid of it, to be never again beguiled by spring. He laughed, and was laughing when he felt the tug.

  It was just that: a tug, a pull, as if someone had yanked on the tails of his coat. He glanced about, but no one was near. A prank, he thought. Young people were like lambs in spring. Then he looked toward the road again.

  He blinked. A solitary horseman—a man, not a boy—sat in the middle of the road, the dust settling around him. He rode a big sorrel mare, her flanks sweaty and caked with dust; she was restless, but the rider checked her with a tight rein and she backed a little, pawing at the road. The people were craning over the fence to see what was coming next, but none of them seemed to notice the rider in the road. The rider, in his turn, seemed unaware of them all; his gaze was fixed toward the south, toward the Presbyterian spire, just visible over the greening trees, that marked the town of Cumberland. Yet the Professor had the impression that the man was not seeing anything at all, that he was lost in some contemplation that not even his fractious mount could disturb.

  Timidly, the Professor approached the fence. There was something familiar about the man—

  After mass young Calvin Jones found himself in the cloister, the cross of ashes still cool on his forehead. With the ashes were the words, still playing in his mind: Remember that thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return. The boy rubbed the ashes away with the back of his hand, but the words remained.

  The light was gone now, and with it the pigeons that had risen to praise God with the bells. But in the cloister there were lanterns and people moving among the arches. Dust they were, all dust.

  It was cold. The boy sat in an archway and listened as the people passed over the damp flagstones, their voices soft, remote. Dust they were, or like the candles in the lanterns burning themselves into nothing: light for a little while, then dark forever. The boy shivered in the cold, and he was dust too. He began to weep, afraid, in the cold dark with the ashes smeared on the back of his hand—