The Black Flower Page 14

  One of their number joined those that ventured out into the stairwell. He lit on the banister. Below, in the downstairs hall, the candle lantern flickered and danced. The wasp tilted his head at the melancholy flame; after a moment he went aloft and glided in perfect linear flight down the stairs. He found the lantern and, after the manner of his kind, began to tap his head against the glass. It made a hard sound: Tink. Tink. Tink. Again and again: Tink. Tink. Tink.

  But of all the house, the hall was the coldest place. The heat passed up the stairs and drew the cold night in through the open doors. The wasp grew sleepy again; he lit on the wall and wandered in aimless circles, groggy and cold. In time his legs failed him, he lost his hold and fell, straight down, like a dropped match.

  He landed in a pool of blood, and there he struggled for a while, waving his legs, making a blur of his wings. At last he pulled free and began to stumble across the hall, drawing a thin line of blood on the floor with the sharp pen of his body. He moved slowly, tacking left and right as he went, sensing but never seeing the enormous shapes that moved above him.

  Finally he met an obstacle: a soldier lying against the wall at the bottom of the stairs. The wasp bumped against one of the soldier’s bare feet, pushed against it, made to go around it, at last began to examine the foot with his front legs and the jointed wands of his antenna. The skin was cold, white, taut, and shriveled, but it offered good purchase. The wasp began to climb. He went slowly, taking his time, until he reached the pinnacle of the big toe; there he stopped and preened himself of the clinging blood, stretching his legs, stretching his wings. When he was done, he arched his body and trembled. There on the splintered nail of the man’s big toe, the wasp sensed he was at a high place and made ready to fly again. He gathered his legs, whirred his wings—and nothing happened. He turned once on the axis of his body and tried again. Nothing. He could not fly. So he picked his way down the slope of the man’s instep, through the thin hairs that grew there, and began to climb again.

  The soldier’s clothing was entirely of wool so that, wherever the wasp traveled, he had to struggle against the nap. Again and again he stopped to free the barbs of his legs from the wool. Climb, stop, pull. Climb, stop, pull. In this way, he moved up the man’s trouser leg.

  While the wasp climbed, the man began to grow restless. He jerked and trembled, began to whimper. He was drenched in blood, though most of it was not his own—it belonged to the men under whom he’d been buried for hours during the battle. It had come from their mouths, their ears, their multiple gunshot wounds; it was freighted with fecal matter, urine, microscopic bits of cloth and leather and flesh, stomach bile—not to mention personalities, histories, dreams, memories. The man was soaked in his comrades’ lives down to the very bolsters of his pocketknife, and while this excited the grayback lice huddling in the seams of the man’s clothing, it distressed the wasp. Such a smell it was, mingled with the smells of powder and sweat and wood-smoke, that the wasp pushed his body up and walked on the stilts of his legs.

  At the thigh, he met a new obstacle. The man’s left hand lay there, fingers trembling; one of the fingers had been shot away at the second joint, and upon it sat a fat, sleepy housefly. The wasp backed away, tried to lift himself off again, but it was no use. He whirred his wings. The housefly circled lazily aloft when the man curled his fingers. Then the hand dropped away, and the wasp moved on.

  He clambered over hills and valleys of cloth. For a moment he disappeared under the man’s waistcoat; it was warm in there, but the stink was so powerful that he backed out again. Then he was on the waistcoat itself. A gold chain, caked with blood, looped across the man’s chest. The wasp followed the chain; in a little while it disappeared into a buttonhole and the wasp moved on. Climb, stop, pull. Climb, stop, pull. From time to time he rested and preened himself.

  He was perched atop a button, resting, when there came a sudden heave and tremor under his feet. He braced himself. The man sneezed, and the wasp was nearly dislodged from the button by a fine red mist of blood.

  Much cleaning this time: head, antennae, body, legs. It was some time before he moved again, up on the shoulder now, then the high collar of the man’s waistcoat, then the cheek itself.

  The beard stubble was rough, but there was no more catching of legs. The wasp avoided the open mouth where the man breathed and made noises. He examined the mustache; it was damp with blood, he tried to find a way around it and at last clambered over it and mounted the smashed bridge of the nose.

  The man’s nose had been broken by the steel buttplate of a Spring-field rifle, in a wild melee at the top of the Federal breastworks. It had been only a glancing blow, else there would have been no need to carry this soldier to the hall of the great brick house. A second blow, delivered as the assailant himself was going down, had blackened one eye and nearly broken the cheekbone and sent all the soldier’s intellect spinning toward the stars. But to the wasp, the flattened bridge of the nose represented only the last possible opportunity for flight. He could go no higher.

  The wasp poised himself exactly between the man’s eyes, and for a moment he rested. The man’s good eye was partly open, but only the white showed. The eyelid fluttered, but the wasp ignored it. Then he was ready. He turned and aligned himself with the glow of the lantern across the hall. He raised the front of his body and pressed his abdomen against the man’s nose. He flexed his wings, then whirred them. One by one his legs lifted off. He was flying. He flew in perfect linear flight to the lantern again and began to knock his head against the glass. Tink. Tink. Tink. After a while he fell, straight down, like a dropped match.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “It’s cousin Anna,” whispered the boy, standing tip-toe beside the bed in his linsey-woolsey trousers.

  The room was airless and hot and lit by a single candle burning on the dressing table. The grate was heaped with glowing ashes from which a little tongue of flame licked upward now and then toward the dark maw of the chimney. In the corner, a girl sat upon a rumpled pallet, rubbing her fists in her eyes.

  “Yes, it is,” said the girl. “Mama brought her up here a while ago and don’t you go wakin her up either.”

  “Who said I was gone wake her up?”

  “Well, you will if you don’t hush,” said the girl in a fierce whisper. “Now you get on back here and lay down.”

  But the boy went on looking at Anna’s face. “She looks mad to me,” he said. “Can you be mad and sleepin at the same time?”

  “You about to find out,” said the girl.

  “Oh, hush your own self, Hattie. I was only askin.”

  Anna lay on the counterpane, still in her stained blue cotton dress; her cousin Caroline had covered her with a shawl, but in her restless sleep she had thrown it off. Her legs and her feet were bare.

  “She don’t have any stockins on,” mused the boy.

  “Winder McGavock, that ain’t any of your business,” said the girl. “And anyway Mama took em off. Now you—”

  On the mantel, an ancient clock gathered itself for the hour. It did not always chime, but when it did no one could predict how long it would go. The hands said four o’clock.

  “Oh, no!” said the girl when she heard the clock. “Of all the times—”

  “I believe that’s the first I ever saw cousin Anna’s feet,” said the boy.

  The clock began to whir deep in its machinery.

  “Hush! Hush, old clock!” said the girl, waving her hands. But the clock began to chime. It chimed and chimed. Then there was another sound, it came from outside on the landing where the soldiers were. Hattie and Winder turned toward the door and listened and the sound came again under the clock’s chiming: a sound like a hurt thing crying, and a dry sound like something moving across the floor. Then the clock went quiet and the children listened in the strange, suspended after-chime, and something bumped against the door.

  “Sister?” said the boy.

  Hattie rose from the pallet and went to the boy and
put her arms around him. She was nine years old, her brother seven but nearly as tall. “It is only the poor soldiers,” she said, but whispering now.

  “They won’t hurt us,” said the boy.

  They listened. Soon they heard a man’s voice; they could not make out the words, but it was a real voice and it was steady and somehow that was better. Then it was quiet again.

  Hattie looked at their cousin’s face. “Well, she is still sleepin anyhow,” she said.

  “She would not mind if we got in the bed,” said the boy.

  The bed was tall and the children had to struggle to climb in. The ropes groaned and creaked under the mattress.

  “Be careful,” whispered Hattie.

  “You just mind your own self,” said the boy.

  The girl crawled gingerly across her cousin’s body. Anna sighed and fisted her hands under her chin.

  “She is frownin, all right,” said Hattie.

  Winder did not answer. He lay down and burrowed his face into the hollow of Anna’s shoulder. Hattie did the same on the other side, pulling the shawl over them all. The mantel clock ticked away; it was the loudest sound now.

  “This room is full of wasps,” Hattie murmured.

  “My, don’t she have such little feet?” Winder said.

  In a moment, they were asleep.

  All the boys are dead, said Bushrod into the dark.

  Tink. Tink. Tink. came the reply, and the little sound reached him in the deep place where he had gone. He looked up—far above his head was a circle of light.

  Tink. Tink. Tink.

  He was rising then, floating upward toward the light. Pretty soon he could make out shapes around him and it was like the picket line at first break of the day when the stump you’ve been watching for hours turns out to be only a stump after all. He was floating, and it was the easiest thing in the world.

  He passed young Jeff Hicks. The boy was trying to sew up a tear in the sleeve of his jacket and Bushrod said I’ll do that for you but the boy never looked up. He went on pulling the needle through the cloth, his mouth twisted in concentration.

  Bushrod heard a girl’s voice. Remy? he said, but there was no one. He smelled dry grass and sycamores, like in the fall of the year.

  Virgil C. Johnson was standing with his hands in his pockets, chewing on a straw. Hey, Bushrod, where you goin? he asked.

  Hey, Virgil C. said Bushrod. Well, I am goin— But he didn’t know where he was going. You come on and go with me he said.

  Aw, I can’t said Virgil C.

  How come? asked Bushrod, but it was already too late. He was much higher now. He watched his friend’s upturned face until he couldn’t see it anymore.

  He passed the three drummers. They were sitting on their drumshells, eating peaches from tins with the tops curled back. Hey, boys said Bushrod and the three men looked at him and tapped their forks on the tins Tink. Tink. Tink. and passed away beneath.

  The circle of light grew nearer. It had been greenish at first, but now it was yellowish-white like a lantern in the woods. Now and then something, a shadow, moved across the light.

  Eugene Pitcock and First Sergeant William ap William Williams were brewing coffee in the lee of a stone wall. Their accoutrements hung nearby in the limbs of a sweetgum tree. The First Sergeant offered Bushrod a steaming cup of coffee; Bushrod put out his hand to take it but it was already out of reach. It’s all right, Bill said Bushrod, I’ll get some directly—

  The light was much brighter now, and something was happening. Bushrod felt it in his face, a fire spreading outward toward his cheekbones. His hand was on fire, too. He held it up—something was wrong with it, he couldn’t tell what. Then he began to feel sick at his stomach. It is all this damned floating, he thought.

  He passed through a place where everything was in confusion. Men were yelling and firing and the smoke was so thick he could hardly see. Then in a clear space he saw a man in a dark-blue frock coat with corporal’s chevrons and the man was yelling at him.

  So—you are the one Bushrod said.

  The man was yelling, but there were no words. He had his musket in the “blow to the front” position.

  I am really not a bad fellow—began Bushrod, but the man developed the stroke and Bushrod saw very clearly the single screw in the steel buttplate, and he was about to parry the blow when the man disappeared in a bright flash and Bushrod Carter burst out into the light and the pain—

  In all the great brick house, only one room had been left intact; only one would have no bloodstains on the floor, nor any ghosts of ragged strangers to prowl the twilights of unborn years. Yet not even that room—the McGavock’s bedroom on the second floor—would altogether escape the hours. There would be other ghosts there: ghosts of dreams and restless sleep, of the little candle that burned on the dressing table, of the fire and the dark, looming bed—ghosts, too, of disembodied cries, unseen foot-steps, noises on the landing and on the gallery outside. All these things would engrave themselves forever on the memory of that room, to wake again from time to time when the house stirred in its sleep.

  In that room, in the dark hours before daylight, Anna and Hattie and Winder slept a little while. Elsewhere the noise and the suffering went on, but for that little while Anna and the children heard none of it. They listened only to their dreams.

  Anna frowned. In her dream, birds rose croaking from a dark and pathless wood. They swirled against the yellow sky and settled one by one in the branches over her head. She waved her arms and shouted, but they would not go away. Their droppings pattered in the mould and they squawked at her: Haw. Haw-haw. Presently a young officer, a Rebel by his short gray jacket, came riding through the wood. Anna did not know about the Rebels, only that they were coming. She turned, but there was no place to go. The officer walked his horse around so that she had to look at him. What is your name? he asked. Nancy she said. No, it ain’t he said and he spoke her name Anna and the birds swirled upward in a cloud and he rode away with her name like he would a locket or a scarf—only he wasn’t supposed to have it. Then children she didn’t know were gathered around her and she was old, in a rusty black dress, and she was telling them the story of this day, and she told them I did not want to be in his heart, I did not belong there. Then one of the children asked But who do you belong to then? and there was a soldier she did not know, sitting in the sunlight, drinking coffee from a tin cup. Nobody she said, and the soldier grinned. Nobody she said again. Not ever. Not ever—and the birds swept over her and fanned their wings in her face and shrieked in her ear—sleep exploded in black fragments around her and she sat straight up in the bed.

  Hattie, too, bolted upright when Winder screamed. “Mama!” she cried, and scrambled to her knees, her eyes round as dollars.

  Winder was crying, his face jammed into the pillow.

  For a moment, Anna was completely lost. She saw Hattie’s face. “What are you doin here?” she asked. “You are supposed to be upstairs.”

  “We are upstairs,” said the girl.

  Anna looked around, blinking the dream away.

  “We was all asleep,” said Hattie, rubbing her eyes. “Now Winder has woke us up.”

  Upstairs. The familiar room took shape in the candlelight and Anna remembered. Caroline had brought her here, put her to bed like a child, took off her stockings—

  “Cousin Anna?”

  “It’s all right,” Anna said. She touched the girl’s face. “I was dreamin, is all.”

  “Winder had a dream,” said Hattie.

  Anna turned to the boy. His face was still pressed into the pillow but he was not crying now. His hair was soaking wet. Anna lay her hand at the nape of the boy’s neck. He moved closer to her. She petted him for a moment, and when he seemed quiet she lay back again. Her pillow was filled with pine needles and smelled like Christmas, and she thought how sweet it was to be there in the bed, in the quiet, with the pine smell and the children around her, and she wanted to sleep for a thousand years—
<
br />   But the boy was crying again. Anna propped herself on an elbow, touched the back of his neck again, petted him. “Winder,” she said, “what was your dream about?”

  The boy shook his head.

  “I have a notion,” Anna said. “Would you care to hear it?”

  “What is it?” said Hattie, but the boy was silent.

  “Well, my notion is this,” said Anna. “Dreams are the broad sea, and the bed is a ship, and Winder McGavock is the captain.”

  “I ain’t,” Winder said, his voice muffled in the pillow.

  “Oh, yes you are,” said Anna. She stroked the boy’s hair. “I know all about these things. The captain steers the ship, did you know that?”

  The boy raised his head and watched her out of his dark eyes. Anna dried his face with the back of her hand. “Now, what are dreams, Winder?”

  The boy thought a moment. “Um, what you have when you are sleepin?”

  “Fooey,” said Anna, and poked him. “Dreams are the sea we are sailin on, dark and troublesome. But the ship is safe—a gallant ship and a brave captain. We are not afraid of the sea, so long as we have the ship under us—are we, Hattie?”

  “No, indeed, not us,” said the girl.

  “But I am the captain,” said the boy.

  “Yes, you are. Now look yonder.” Anna pointed to the candle guttering on the dressing table. “That’s a lighthouse, see?” The boy turned his head to look.

  “That’s a lighthouse, Winder,” said Hattie.

  “That’s right,” said Anna. “Now look up there.” She pointed toward the ceiling where a squadron of wasps were stumbling and buzzing about. “What do you think those are?”

  The boy looked sleepily upward. “Wasts,” he said.