The Year of Jubilo Page 11

  THEY DID NOT embrace. Not even in his most elaborate fancies had Gawain envisioned them doing that. But Aunt Vassar touched him. Her hand moved back and forth between them, touching first her bosom, then some part of Gawain Harper’s body: his arms, his hair, his breast, and at last his face, her fingers brushing his cheek. Finally, Gawain captured her hand in its flight and held it. Her hand closed around his for an instant, then dropped away. “You look pretty bad,” she said, her voice barely audible.

  Gawain smiled. He knew she was willing herself not to cry, turning all her strength inward for this moment to spare herself the waste of tears. It was all right; he had imagined it thus, and she had not disappointed him.

  For himself, Gawain struggled not to register his shock at her appearance. He had left her a great, buxom, shiplike woman, always in black and smelling of rose water and lavender powder. She was still in black, but she had shrunken and dried. The eyes behind her spectacles were hollow, curiously still and lightless, as if she had just awakened from a long, uneasy sleep. She smelled different, too—a dry, weary smell, like a milkweed husk, or something left in the attic for years. Gawain performed his own act of will then, driving away the memory of her until he could see clearly the woman who stood before him. “You, on the other hand, are beautiful,” he said.

  “Hah,” she said. She looked him over again, from head to foot. “Have you been wrestlin hogs?” she asked.

  “Somethin like it,” he said. “But never fear—I shall go to the well-house and wash. Maybe young Vincent can bring me some of my clothes.”

  She laughed dryly and waved her hand. “Young Vincent went off with the yankees last summer. I’ll send Uncle Priam, who is still here underfoot and forever a nuisance. Go on, now—I’ll watch you go, then I’ll tell your papa you are … home.”

  “Papa,” said Gawain. “Is he—”

  “Time for that,” said his aunt. “Go on now.”

  So Gawain left the wide porch, went around the house and through the muddy yard to the cluster of outbuildings in back: the kitchen, the well-house, the crib, the chicken coop and, fifty paces downwind, the privy. The grass was tall around all of them; only the privy and the well had paths worn to the door. Gawain had never seen the kitchen, winter or summer, without a curl of smoke out its chimney, but there was no smoke now, and the brick walk that ran to the house was almost hidden in the grass. Gawain figured they must be cooking on the hearth, what little they had to cook. Certainly they had no chickens—the coops were a ruin.

  Standing at the door to the well-house, Gawain sensed that something was missing, something removed from the familiar landscape he had carried in his head. He compared what he saw to the plan of his memory and realized it was the barn—yes, the cow barn and the fence that surrounded the lot. Gone for soldiers’ shanties, Gawain decided, or for fires, or for breastworks. He wondered briefly if the Federal government would be interested in paying for all that wood, now that he was a loyal citizen once more. Doubtful, he thought.

  It was cool inside the well-house. The sun slanted in ribbons through the boards, and by its light Gawain could see the spiderwebs that festooned the ceiling, nasty things where great surly spiders lurked. There was the usual wasps’ nest too, tucked in a corner, busy with inhabitants. They didn’t bother him, but the spiders made him nervous. If one were to drop on him—but he forced the thought away and began to peel off his clothes.

  He was nearly done washing out of the well bucket when old Priam tapped on the door and entered, his arms full of clothing. Gawain had never known Priam when he wasn’t old, so he looked no older now than he ever had. A little bent perhaps, but no grayer, and his eyes still glittered with flecks like gold in the irises. “Here’s your clothes, young Marse,” said Priam matter-of-factly, as if Gawain had not been gone at all.

  “I ain’t so young anymore,” said Gawain.

  “I ain’t noticed,” the old man said. He studied Gawain in the dim light for a moment. “Well, you never was much to look at nekkid,” he said, “but you have fell off some. Been a long time—is you farin well gen’rally?”

  “Gen’rally,” said Gawain. “Aunt said young Vincent run off. How come you still here?”

  The old man laughed softly. “I knowed you gone ask me that. Now I turn it around, ask you: what you come back for?”

  Gawain understood that he had been a fool. “Same answer as you,” he said. “Can’t go no place but home.”

  “Mmm-hmm,” said Uncle Priam.

  Gawain indicated the muddy clothes on the floor of the well-house. “I bought these down south. Reckon you can clean em up? Ought not to be any graybacks in em, just mud mostly. Maybe a flea or two.”

  The old man nodded, bent slowly and gathered up the clothes Gawain had traveled the road in. “I shave a little lye soap in the water, kill most anything. Brush your coat out, dry it in the shade, it’ll be all right. Marse Gawain?”

  “Yes, old Priam?”

  The old man narrowed his golden eyes. “You killed some, didn’t you, back endurin the war?”

  “I reckon,” said Gawain. “It’s what you do. There ain’t much gettin around it.”

  “Well, then.” Uncle Priam looked up at the gray rafters where the spiders lived. “You didn’t bring none of em back with you, did you?”

  “I hope not, old Priam,” said Gawain. “I surely hope I didn’t.”

  The old man nodded again. “I put your bag upstairs,” he said, “in your old room. Opened the windows, see could I let a little air in there.” Then he turned and passed through the door and closed it behind him.

  Gawain dressed in the clothes Uncle Priam had brought: cotton drawers and socks, a muslin shirt, a pair of brown plaid breeches, and the old boots he used to hunt birds in. All but the socks and boots were a size too large now. Old Priam had brought a handkerchief, and, folded inside, a gold watch and chain. There was a comb, too, and a bone-handled clasp knife. When he had dressed and run the comb through his hair, Gawain felt better than he had in a long time. He looked up at the wasps’ nest. “Why don’t you boys do somethin about these spiders?” he said. As if in answer, a wasp sortied out from the nest and spun lazily around his head, then disappeared through a crack in the boards. For an instant, Gawain saw him burnished golden in the shaft of the sun.

  SOME OF THE men who had passed through the boxcar jail had carved their names on the wall of the car, and some had scrawled them there with a burnt stick. The four current residents, all awake now, had pondered this and built a discussion about the way some men yearn for immortality, and some move through life leaving no more trace than they would in water. To illustrate his own view, S. Cragin Knox was carving his name with his clasp knife, in letters bigger and deeper than any before. The others, meanwhile, sat in the open doorway and watched the afternoon.

  “I hope you are satisfied, Peck,” said Carl Nobles, “now that we are jailed.” Nobles was a big man, bearded, in a checked gingham shirt and jeans pants. Marcus Peck, too, was stout; it had taken them all to hoist him into the boxcar when they’d first arrived. Peck had lost his left leg outside Atlanta when a limber chest he was serving exploded from counterbattery fire. When he was first home, Peck made up a tale about being blown up in the air while his severed leg spun aloft beside him. When he found that people believed him, he quit telling it.

  “Well, it wasn’t me started that affair,” said Peck. “Look to yourselves—I was only makin an observation, and for that, I was set upon by ruffians. This used to be a free country, as I recall.”

  “And what would a bloody fat Irishman know about a free country?” snorted Nobles.

  “Sirrah!” said Peck.

  Nobles and Peck went on arguing—out of habit, Stribling supposed—while Knox went on carving.

  Cragin Knox had been a cabinetmaker once, and a fixer of delicate things, and a crafter of mandolins and violins, and a fine gunsmith. He was an expert shot, and served much of his time in the war as a sharpshooter with General Cleburn
e, who gave him a Whitworth rifle and allowed him to travel at large along the division front. After Cleburne’s death at Franklin and the terrible winter defeat at Nashville, Knox left the line of retreat and began walking home, hundreds of miles across the barren winter landscape. Almost within sight of his mother’s house in Cumberland, he was captured by Federal cavalry and sent all the way up to the Rock Island Prison in Illinois. He had not been home long now, and he still had the prison thinness on him; the skin of his face stretched taut against the skull, and his clothes hung loose upon him. He had a wracking cough that, at times, seemed about to burst his narrow chest. Stribling was astonished that Knox had been able to join in the fight at the tavern; the act of carving his name seemed to exhaust him. Still he worked on, stopping now and then to rest, saying nothing until he was done. “I am finished, boys,” he said at last.

  They all turned at once to look at Knox’s work. He had fashioned, in perfect Roman font, the legend

  S. CRAGIN KNOX, GENT.

  1830–1865

  No one spoke, for each had learned, in his own way, at whatever expense, that a soldier’s self-prophecies were never to be taken lightly, and never acknowledged until the invitation was made. Knox invited no response. He sat down against the wall under his carving, stretched out his legs, clasped his fingers, and began at once to snore.

  “Well,” said Peck after a moment, watching his comrade. “The kind maiden, Sleep. How soft she comes.”

  “And the thief, Time,” said Stribling.

  They were silent for a while then, watching the afternoon die around them. They had all traveled a long way and had gained a costly wisdom in the journeying. They did not need to be reminded that few such golden afternoons were left to S. Cragin Knox, Gent. This vanished rain, this twilight, the season grown old—then the dark sister of sleep would call. By then, no doubt, the boxcar would be far away, the carved name traveling on in darkness.

  “Where do you come from, Mister Stribling?” asked Nobles suddenly.

  Stribling shrugged. “No place in particular,” he said. Then, to temper his rudeness, he added, “Alabama, mostly.” He told about meeting Gawain on the road, and, in brief, their subsequent adventures.

  “I don’t know the fellow at the grave you mentioned, though it is a good story,” said Nobles. “However, I do know Molochi Fish. He is fearful strange for certain. I wouldn’t be surprised, now the niggers are free, they don’t get him some dark night. So Gawain Harper is home at last?”

  “Yes,” said Stribling. He looked past the sentry, up the road that led to town. The shadows were growing longer. He slapped at a mosquito. Pretty soon now, he thought.

  “That’s a good horse,” said Nobles, pointing at Zeke.

  “Oh, Xenophon will do,” said Stribling, “though he is a little spare right now.”

  Nobles shifted, rubbed his thighs. “I have to ask you a question, sir—a favor, I reckon.”

  “You can ask it, Mister Nobles,” said Stribling.

  The other shifted again, as if he had to be situated just so for the words to be right. “I am in a bind,” he said at last. “My ox is in a ditch.”

  Stribling waited.

  “You see,” said Nobles, “I had not thought to include this fracas on my afternoon’s itinerary.”

  “Nor I,” said Stribling.

  “Plainly put,” said Nobles, “I need to be somewhere this evenin, and … ”

  “You need a horse?” said Stribling helpfully.

  “More than anything in the world,” said Nobles. “I’d gladly pay—”

  “No, no,” said Stribling. “I won’t need the horse tonight, and he could stand the exercise. However—” He looked around at the boxcar. “We are in jail, you understand.”

  “Pah!” snorted Nobles. “That is only a formality.” He put out his hand, and Stribling took it. “Thank you, sir,” said Nobles. “You are a friend.”

  “Now, let me tell you about Zeke’s peculiarities,” said Stribling, and he did.

  THE HOUSE WAS cool and smelled as it always had in summer, of mildew and damp, of dust, of old books and tobacco and candles. Through the tall open windows came the light breeze, bringing with it a clean smell of oak leaves and the faint, buttery perfume of the lantana. Gawain stood in the dim front hall, the wide space made gloomier somehow by the light from the open front door. When he was a boy, this hall was a frightening region to him, and he rarely lingered here. But he lingered now, remembering how it was, breathing the old stale air among the old familiar shapes: the coat tree, the table, the stiff chairs where no one ever sat, the horsehair settee and the portraits covered with gauze against the summer. The house was utterly silent, save for the tinkle of a lamp pendant moved by the breeze, and the slight rasp of his aunt’s inhalation. She stood beside him, her hands together at the front of her dress, watching him from the corner of her eye. After a moment, she looked away; when she spoke, her voice was hushed almost to a whisper. “I cannot imagine what it must be like,” she said.

  “What, darlin?”

  She lay her palm on the marble top of the hall table, then brushed absently at the dust. “I have lived in this house since it was raised, nearly thirty years. I was already an old maid when I came here—your papa was kind to take me in, his old-maid sister-in-law.” She studied her palm. “He was kind to me, Gawain, always. Whatever else he was, you cannot forget that. You have to give him that.”

  “I will remember it,” said Gawain, knowing that he really would, if only for his own peace. He knew the story of Vassar Bishop’s life, how she had been the sister elected to stay with the old folks in Alabama until they died. By then her prospects were gone; there was nothing for her to do but follow her sister west, to the new territory, where her sister’s husband promised a place for her. She came to this house then, and saw it raised and finished out of the wilderness, and saw the Choctaw trading post of Frye’s Tavern wax and grow into Cumberland: houses built, and churches, and the beautiful Georgian courthouse, and the mercantile anchor of the old square. And saw it fall again to ashes and dust. And, Gawain had no doubt, would live to see it rise once more.

  “I have never left here,” Aunt Vassar said, more to herself than to her nephew. “Maybe a night or two, I could count them on my fingers. So I don’t know what it must be like to come back.” She looked at Gawain then. “What does it look like to you? Has it changed much? That’s a foolish question, maybe.”

  “No,” said Gawain. “No, it ain’t foolish.” His eyes traveled to the row of portraits that hung on the west wall; they peered back from the plaster above the wainscoting, dim behind their curtains of gauze, watching another day wane in the long procession of days that had passed since Frank Harper, Gawain’s father, had hung them there. Gawain’s grandfather was there, in the high stiff collar and cravat of the ’twenties; Frank Harper himself, in the black frock coat he wore every day, winter and summer; his bride, Ellie, Gawain’s mother, fragile and beautiful and remote, more real than she had been in life. Gawain as a callow young man of twenty was there, and his sisters. And Aunt Vassar.

  The portrait of Aunt Vassar, painted when she was a girl in Alabama, was like none other Gawain had ever seen. Her young face—almost Byronic, with short-cropped hair and eyes that seemed to dart away when they were looked at—leapt out from a vague and stormy background. She wore a blouse open at the throat with the collar turned up, like a poet or a harlot, and in his time Gawain had looked on that portrait and felt every stirring the blood is capable of. The image was scandalous, immeasurably fine, and, by life’s mad chemistry, the saddest of them all.

  “No, darlin,” Gawain said at last. “It is just as I remembered.”

  “Then what do you feel? Is time that heavy that it never moves at all? Where have you been, then?”

  Gawain shook his head. “I don’t know how to answer you. I have been a long way, and all of a sudden I’m in the front hall again. I am … I reckon I am too tired to think about it now.”

/>   His aunt laughed. “I know no more about it than I did a while ago, except that you have learned to lie in the army—not that you were any slouch at it before. Come then, and see your papa.”

  She led the way up the creaking stairs to the landing, then down the upper hall to the last bedroom door. It was open, and she stopped just short of it and turned and put her hand flat against Gawain’s breast. “You know more about time than you let on,” she said, “and you must have been seein this moment in your head for a long while.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said.

  “All right, then. I will tell you, and let you decide how close it comes to whatever it was you imagined. Gawain, your papa is senile, infantile, he can’t remember what he had for breakfast—though all he’d have to do is look at his shirt front—and he is deaf as a lamp post, so speak up when you talk to him. Not that it matters—he won’t know what you’re sayin anyhow. There now. Go on in. When you are done, I will fix you somethin to eat.”

  She stood aside. Gawain stepped past her and into the room.

  Frank Harper sat with his back to the door, gazing out the tall windows at the leaves of a hackberry tree. Gawain could see the bare dome of his head above the chair back; it was feathered with wisps of white hair that shone like spun silk in the light. From this angle, too, he could see the gnarled, spotted hands where they gripped the arms of the chair. “Papa?” he said. When there was no reply, he looked back at his aunt. She shook her head and motioned him further into the room. He took a step, then another, and at last stepped around the chair and looked at his father’s face.

  The eyes were sunk deep and glittered like chips of coal. The skin of the old man’s face stretched taut around his cheekbones, and his nose was sharp and bladelike. His thin lips were moving, but no sound came. As Gawain watched, he raised his hand and dug at his nose, then his fingers moved downward to his watch chain and stopped there. He seemed to be watching something in the leaves; he did not look up.

  “Papa,” said Gawain.