The Black Flower Read online

  “Don’t say ‘wasts’!” said Hattie.

  “Well anyhow,” said Anna, “they are not wasps right now. They are seagulls and pelicans. You know what that means?”

  “If they come down here they will sting the fire out of us,” said the boy.

  “Well, play like they’re gulls and pelicans, blame it,” said Anna. “What do you think it means?”

  The boy looked at her, his face gathering itself to cry again. “Oh, my,” said Anna. “All right. All right.” She drew the boy to her, rocking him, petting him. “It means we are nearly to the shore,” she whispered. Hattie nestled against her back; she put out her hand and touched the girl’s leg.

  “I want to be captain next,” said Hattie.

  In a little while, when the children were asleep again, Anna gently untangled herself from their arms and legs and sat up on the edge of the bed. Watching her cousins, she wondered if she had launched them on dark and troublesome waters again. But, no—it was better they sleep, dreams or not.

  She glanced at the mantel clock and sighed. Four-thirty. She had been asleep a little over two hours, and it was still two hours to sunrise. God in heaven, she thought—will we never get to the end of this night? There was supposed to be an end to night, it ought not to just go on and on.

  At least the hurting in her head was gone. In its place was a soreness that was almost a pleasure by comparison, like the healing socket of a tooth. But now that the children were asleep and she had no one to talk to, her mind began to gray with confusion and slide back toward the dark sea. She ran her fingers through her hair—like Winder’s, it was soaked with sweat. Why is it so hot in here? she wondered dully. She looked at her hands: they were grimy with soot and dried blood rimmed the fingernails and the lines of her knuckles. What would the young men think of her hands now? And her feet: what were they doing bare? And why couldn’t she breathe? It was not enough that time had stopped; now the very air itself had thickened like a stagnant pool.

  Then she saw the fire, or rather the sullen mountain of coals where the fire had been. It glowed and sputtered, and Anna understood that the reason she couldn’t breathe the air was that there wasn’t any—the fire had eaten it all. She knew a sweet girl once who had died when the stove had eaten all the air in her room and she went to sleep and woke up in the arms of God—Anna nodded and thought I will open those shutters by and by but she was looking at the floor and her eyes began to trace the pattern in the rug. It meandered here and there—vines, she thought, but she was too tired to study much about it. Her eyes grew heavy and a little pendulum in her mind began to swing in time to the clock’s slow ticking, and it all seemed to match the rug’s pattern in an interesting way—

  She saw a horseman in a green wood and she was moving toward him and her heart was beating very fast, so fast she could hardly breathe. I knew you would come he said, and swung his booted leg over the bare back of the horse and dropped to the ground. He stood with his legs a little apart and watched her, smiling, his hand out, and when she drew near he began to back away. She followed, wanting him to stop Wait she said. Deeper and deeper into the wood he led her, through the slanting sunlight, and he laughed and teased when she stumbled or when the branches lashed her Please wait she said, over and over again. Then he turned and ran away, and Anna stopped. She was angry and felt foolish and was about to turn back toward the house when she heard him call her name and everything flew out of her but the sound of his voice I’m comin she said, and ran, and found him at last in an open sunlit glade carpeted with spring clover. His riding coat was spread out on the ground. Anna he laughed. Anna. He held out his hands.

  She walked out into the glade; she came slowly, her heart beating fast, she smelled the sweet clover and the hot, rank grass. Crows were talking to one another in trees somewhere. Haw they said. Haw-haw.

  She came to him. She could see the little beads of sweat on his upper lip and the damp curls of his hair. Anna he said. He touched her cheek and traced down it with the tips of his fingers. Don’t do that, don’t she said. Now, Anna he said.

  The crows were talking in the trees; she heard the dinner bell ringing at home—it seemed miles and miles away though it was just across the wood—and smelled the smoke from the cookhouse. I better not she said, but the boy took her hard by the shoulders, pulled her to him. He bent his face to kiss her but she turned her face away Don’t do that she said and the boy said What are you afraid of? and turned her face and kissed her hard on the mouth. What are you afraid of, Anna? and brought the flat of his hand down to her breast and the breath nearly left her—no boy had ever touched her there. She tried to pull away but he held her, began to whisper in her ear words she had never heard before, never imagined, but she knew what they meant and the blood rose in her and not all of it shame. She felt his mouth on the curve of her neck What are you afraid of? and his hand was on her face and he was talking about her eyes, her mouth. She tried to tell him No—it is not supposed to be like this and tried to tell him But I love you but his hand clamped hard on her mouth and with a single powerful movement pushed her down onto his coat in the sweet-smelling clover and he was saying her name over and over—the crows, every single leaf in the trees overhead and the sound of the dinner bell a long way off, and somewhere there was pain and a momentary gasp of pleasure to which she almost surrendered, then the hot jetting seed that consumed, in a single wasteful flame, every dream she would have forever—

  “Stop it!” Anna cried, and for the second time that night sleep burst in fragments like black glass around her and she was standing in the middle of the room, her legs pressed so tight together that the muscles were cramping—

  Oh damn, she thought, and felt her way blindly back to the bed and pulled herself up and sat with her bare feet dangling, her hands pressed hard against her temples. Oh damn, damn, damn, she thought. You are dead. Leave me alone. You are dead—and she told herself over and over again that he was dead, she knew it, been dead nearly two years on a cavalry raid in Mississippi—she heard it told about one morning by the old men around the stove in her papa’s office: what a shame it was, they said—such a good boy, full of promise, lost in the war. One of the old men looked at her and saw her face and said, Why, Miss Anna, didn’t you know? and she ran so they couldn’t see her face.

  But they didn’t know everything, those old men tapping their canes on the puncheon floor telling how bravely he died. They didn’t know what he’d taken with him, nor about the part of him that hadn’t died. Or maybe they did know; maybe there were terrible secrets you didn’t learn until you were old, maybe there were things you believed all your life until one day you were suddenly old and discovered they were all a lie—like people being gone when they are dead, and the notion that the winter always turns to spring, the night to day—

  Then she was choking for air. All at once there was nothing left to breathe and she remembered the girl who had awakened in the arms of God and she thought all right—I won’t breathe then. All she had to do was lie down and go to sleep, and when she awoke—what? Who would be waiting for her?

  Then Hattie moved in her sleep and whimpered, and Anna remembered and cursed herself for a fool.

  She got down from the bed and felt the floor hot against her feet. She staggered, nearly fell, caught herself, stumbled across the room to the window. She had to struggle with the catch but at last it was free and she raised the window and flung the shutters open with a bang—the air pouring across the gallery was cold and smoky and foul with the taste of lateness, but she breathed deep of it, filled her lungs with it. “You are dead, damn you!” she shouted at the darkness.

  “Beg pardon?” said a voice outside.

  Anna jumped. She realized all at once that the upper gallery was full of men; they were smoking and leaning their elbows on the balustrade, and now they were all looking at her. She blushed. “Oh, nothin,” she said. “Nothin atall, never mind—I, um, I just have to open these windows, there are children sleepin here�
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  “Why, that’s all right, Missy,” said the voice. “We won’t be no bother. Jes close the shutters to and you won’t even know we’re here.”

  “Thank you,” she said, and brought the shutters closed. For a moment she stood with her forehead pressed against them. She could hear the mens’ voices now, talking quietly where they stood along the gallery—strangers, waiting for a dawn that wouldn’t come. She imagined the dark grove and the fields beyond, and the fires that burned there, and other strangers moving in the night. These men, she thought. They are all in hell, and I am in hell, and cousin Caroline, and Hattie and Winder—

  The thought of the children shocked her. She had almost failed them, and she turned quickly expecting them to be dead anyway, or vanished, or lost somehow. But they were sleeping. Anna found the shawl and pulled it over them. A flame licked brightly in the fireplace, feeding on the new air, and by its sudden light Anna caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror. She stared at the drawn and haggard face as if it were a stranger’s, or the face of one she had not seen for a long, long time. Then she shook it off and took up the candle and searched until she found her slippers. She slipped them on, it felt strange to wear them without stockings. A wasp dropped from the ceiling and lit on her arm. She smacked it away, and it began to wander in helpless circles on the floor. She stomped on it with her slippered foot. She stomped it again and again. “Now you are dead, you son of a bitch!” she said. Then, knowing it was a lie, she leaned against the dresser and cried.

  The clock did not strike at five. It called attention to itself with some vigorous noises, but it did not strike. Anna looked at it without interest. She had cried until the deep well of crying had gone dry, and there was a hollowness in her. She looked at the body of the wasp where it lay on the floor—already it seemed to be disappearing, shriveling away into dust. She was sorry for it now, but she could not bring it back.

  She knew she had to go. Her cousin Caroline must still be down there among all that suffering and waste, and Anna, even if she wasn’t much use, ought to be with her. She bent once more over the children, careful lest she break the delicate bubble of peace in which they lay. She wanted to touch them, but dare not. “Oh, sleep,” she whispered, and closed her eyes and almost prayed, but she caught herself just in time, remembering. There was no use in her praying for anything at all.

  She blew out the candle and eased across the patterned rug to the door. When she looked back she could hardly see the bed, the great ship, and the children were only huddled shapes in the dark. But they were all right. They would be all right tomorrow too, if it ever came. Anna thought about the men outside on the gallery. She was glad they were there; finding them smoking and talking quietly had been comforting, it was what men did in the evenings when the work was done. Of course, the work was not done, and she doubted that it ever would be. It would go on and on, even after the house was emptied of strangers, long after the wildflowers had blossomed a hundred times on their graves.

  She spoke one last time into the quiet room. “I know You are here,” she said. “Are You ready to listen yet?” But there was no answer, and after a moment she passed through the door and closed it softly behind her.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The dawn that Anna feared might never come would appear on schedule, just as it always had—and after it another and another. And yesterday would become Last Month, then Last Winter, then Last Year, then Two and Five and Ten Years Ago, and one day the people would have to stop and think before they could say how long ago it was that the great Battle of Franklin was fought. By then the rain would have softened the rifle pits and breastworks and even the big Federal fort across the river into smooth, grassy mounds. The vines and creepers would do their work, and the cedars and oaks, the walnuts and hickories, so that places where men once fought in the open would vanish in the young woods and underbrush. Older trees, splintered by musketry, would fall to the axe or silently decay under the rain; these last would glow with foxfire some nights, like the ghosts of trees. Pistols and rifles and bayonets would sink deeper into the earth where they would grow into shapeless tubers of rust; buried shells and round shot would sleep, waiting for the plow to bring them to light again; discarded jackets would rot away and leave behind clusters of tarnished buttons, and perhaps a pocketknife, and here and there a watch frozen at the moment when its wheels and balance had ceased forever. Boys, after spring rains, would gather minie balls to use for fishing weights, or to sell to the curious.

  Men who found themselves still alive at that first dawning would pass away from Franklin sooner or later. The wounded, most of them, would be taken by the advancing Federals in a month or so and sent north to prison, where many of them would die. The quick would cross the river in time, and fight at Nashville, and many of these would die. Most, in time, would find themselves diffused into life again; they would pass into the sunlight of distant courthouse squares and country crossroads, where they would spend their days looking backward. The dead, who on that first morning seemed to possess the earth, would themselves be possessed by the earth, first in shallow graves and trenches and at last (many of them) under the grass and clover of the burying ground by the great brick house, where the McGavocks made a place for them. There would even be stones in time, and on some of these would be names and the numbers of regiments, and the names would fade in living memory as the ink faded in the little book where Caroline McGavock recorded them. Other stones would mark the places of men whose names had vanished with their lives, and for these there was a common epitaph: Unknown Confederate Soldier.

  Now and then, for a number of years, an occasional squirrel hunter or party of picnickers, or some wandering soul in search of solitude, would discover in the thickets a pitiful collection of bones and rags and buttons and rusted rifle that once was a man. At such times, the people would gather and look quietly down at the thing, while the skull—if the varmints had not carried it off—would stare back at them in mute contemplation. Then, after a while, someone would gather the bones and cloth and buttons and hide them away under the earth, under a new stone with the old epitaph: Unknown Confederate Soldier.

  There would come a day when old men would walk among the gray stones and tap them with sticks and say I knew this one or He was of my brigade or Were these not Cleburne’s men? These old ones would muse among the graves for a while, then sit in the shade of the trees and smoke (there would be a flask, too, most likely) and try to remember what it was like when they were young and the ground was passing quickly under their feet, and the broomsage rustled, and the flags broke out above them in the smoky afternoon. But too much time intervened, too many seasons, and what they remembered would be as they remembered youth and love: fragmented, lit dimly by the flame of recollected passion but unreachable, and too much lost behind doors that would remain closed forever. Perhaps in their quiet talk they would speak of what it all had meant to them once, and evoke the old proud fictions of Duty and Country and God, knowing all the time that the truth, if there ever had been truth, no longer dwelt among them. Even the old wrathful names of their battles seemed not to ring as they once had—worn out, perhaps, from too much talk. In time the old men would cease talking and merely sit together in the shade, each one thankful for the silence. And they would look out over the stones and the grass and the tranquil bloodless fields and find, each in his turn, the only truth that was left them: that the stones possessed a logic of their own, that it all seemed to make sense once but didn’t now, and whatever meaning there once was could no longer be got at by old men drowsing in the sunlight with full bellies and no one to shoot at them. With this, all distinctions blurred—between enemies, between the living and the dead—until the old men arose and knocked out their pipes and walked away, wanting to forgive everyone, starting with themselves.

  The women, too, would come and stroll among the graves under the solemn domes of their umbrellas. They, too, had their talk—but of children lost or grown into happines
s and success; of remembered weddings and funerals, mutual kin, of what went on last summer at Beersheba or Abita Springs or Pass Christian. Of anything, in short, but what lay at their feet. Meanwhile, among the chatter and gossip and decorum, the women kept a wary eye on their old men yonder lest they should somehow slip away again. For the women had a truth of their own: they had been robbed once, and would be robbed again if they were not careful. The old soldiers smoking in the shade, whose names and children and destinies they bore, had been taken from them once, had journeyed into hell, then returned into the midst of life—only something had not returned. Some part of them abided still, down among the smoke, and liked it there, had to be there, would not choose to return even if it could. This the women could not forgive. Much was taken, too little returned; distinctions blurred, and the hearts that might have lain like picked roses in the women’s hands were buried forever under the stones with the dead.

  So the women would not forgive. Their passion remained intact, carefully guarded and nurtured by the bitter knowledge of all they had lost, of all that had been stolen from them. For generations they vilified the Yankee race so the thief would have a face, a name, a mysterious country into which he had withdrawn and from which he might venture again. They banded together into a militant freemasonry of remembering, and from that citadel held out against any suggestion that what they had suffered and lost might have been in vain. They created the Lost Cause, and consecrated that proud fiction with the blood of real men. To the Lost Cause they dedicated their own blood, their own lives, and to it they offered books, monographs, songs, acres and acres of bad poetry. They fashioned out of grief and loss an imaginary world in which every Southern church had stabled Yankee horses, every nick in Mama’s furniture was made by Yankee spurs, every torn painting was the victim of a Yankee sabre—a world in which paint did not stick to plaster walls because of the precious salt once hidden there; in which bloodstains could not be washed away and every other house had been a hospital.