The Black Flower Page 16

  But their greatest, their supreme and most poignant accomplishment, was the Confederate Soldier. Out of the smoke they plucked him, and set him atop a stone pedestal in the courthouse yard where he stood free at last of hunger and fear and raggedness and madness and violence; where he would never desert nor write home for a substitute, never run, never complain of short rations, never question the sacred Cause of which he was protector, and for which he had marched forth to willing sacrifice. But his musket was always at rest, and not for nothing was he always young, his eyes always soft as he looked backward over the long years. For he really was no soldier at all, but an image created by women, and he was born not of war but of sorrow and of fierce desire.

  All these things the women created—and who could blame them? Certainly Anna Hereford never did, as she walked among the quiet stones, remembering.

  Anna would never join the United Daughters of the Confederacy, declining their petitions year by year, politely and without excuse, until the petitions ceased. She would submit no elegiac poems to the newspaper, would leave no privately-printed memoir. When the Confederate monument was to be dedicated on the square at Fayetteville, Anna declined to attend, and this time she gave a reason: the face of the statue, she said, reminded her of someone she had once known. She would not say who.

  But every year, on the anniversary of the great battle, Anna would return to Franklin. Sometimes the weather was bad and Anna, wrapped in a cloak, would watch the mist-shrouded hills pass almost imperceptibly into night. At such times she would shiver, and look out from under the dripping eaves of her umbrella until the darkness was complete. Then she would return to her cousins’ house (or, later, to the boarding house in the village where a room was always waiting for her at the end of November), and there, by the fire on the hearth, she would light a lamp and after a little while take from her Gladstone bag a soiled, clothbound book and open it and trace with her finger the single pencilled line in the flyleaf, saying the words over in her mind until she could hear them just in the way she wanted. Then she would close the book and sit with it under her hand while the lamp burned quietly toward the dawn.

  Most years, though, the weather was as it had been when the Army of Tennessee came down through the gap in the hills, and arrayed itself on the plain, and at last slanted its ragged banners toward the enemy in the smoke. On these days, Anna would walk the grounds of the great brick house, and walk in the oak grove (always finding the places she sought there, knowing them even under the vines and the new growth of cedar), and at last she would visit the cemetery. Sometimes a party of veterans would be there, and their ladies walking a little distance apart; with these Anna would pass the time of day, listening to their stories but never telling any of her own, until at last she would take her leave and go up to the family plot and (in time) sit down by her cousin Caroline’s stone. There she would look down over the little slope where the soldiers lay, and she would try to understand what it all meant to her.

  On such days, beyond the burying ground the woods and fields drowsed in the autumn sunlight as if nothing at all had happened here, as if there could really be no connection between the quiet earth and these men who lay beneath it. Perhaps there wasn’t, she thought—at least, not anymore. And yet there was something, always: a shape, a movement, imperfectly seen then lost in the light and shadows. At such times, she thought of her old nurse Jeanne, whom her father had gotten from the Ursuline sisters in New Orleans some years before the war. Jeanne said the rosary three times a day in French, and she could see ghosts. She would point to an empty sunlit pasture and say, “You see her, cherie? That young woman there, hurrying along—look quick!” And little Anna would look, and it would seem to her that there was something there, like the empty space people leave behind for an instant when they have turned a corner or passed through a door. So it was in the sunny autumn afternoons, when Anna sat by her cousin’s grave and looked out over the field of Franklin.

  Once little Anna came upon her nurse sitting in the yard, looking south toward where the Elk River lay. Jeanne was still a young woman then, and handsome. Anna sat beside her, and for a while made chains and bracelets out of clover blossoms, then looked at her nurse and said, “Jeanne, s’il vous plait, what are ghosts anyhow?”

  “Hah,” said the other, still looking toward the south.

  After a long silence, Anna put out her hand and touched the woman’s cheek. It was wet. “Jeanne?” she said.

  “I’ll tell you what they is,” said the woman. “They is rememberin, that’s all. Ever now and then the earth turn over in his sleep and remember things, same as we do. Now go ’long with you, and see have Mister James come back from town.”

  The earth remembers things.

  On the afternoon of the Battle of Franklin, when the Rebels were going in all along the Federal line, Anna went upstairs to fetch a favorite doll of Hattie’s. She found it and was about to go back down, when curiosity drew her to the back gallery. Here, she supposed, was the only battle she would ever be in, and she ought to get a look at it while she could.

  One look was enough. In fact, she could see very little: a dense cloud of white smoke boiling skyward was the most dramatic thing in view. But the sound! The sound rose from the battle like a living thing—more palpable, more real than the smoke itself. She had imagined gunshots, vollies, cheers, the heavy report of cannon—but this was a sustained bedlam, not a collection of sounds but a single unimaginable detonation that hung in the air and multiplied upon itself until it seemed the very earth would explode. For the first time she understood why men she had known—Yankee cavalrymen in Fayetteville, paroled Confederates, returned wounded, even men like her papa from the Mexico war, all who had seen this creature—could never seem to describe it. She would never be able to herself; if the words were there, she would never find them, nor ever meet anyone who had.

  Then as Anna listened another sound began to rise within the first. It began as a low keening, like the wind in a bottle tree, almost indiscernible amid the guns. Yet it was there, and it grew and grew, gaining strength and timbre until suddenly a new note broke away and was taken up: a high weird quavering like nothing that Anna had ever heard, that peopled the smoke with an army of mourning phantoms. Anna had heard the men talk of this, too—the uncanny demon cry of the Rebel army going into the attack—and now here it was for real, echoing across violence and death for the last time in a wild crescendo that seemed to peak and yet peak again: descanting blood, crying lost youth and the loss of all dreams. One last time it shrilled out of the rolling smoke, then collapsed all at once into a maelstrom of voices—the deep snarling utterance of thousands of men in hell.

  Anna fled from the gallery and ran blindly through her cousins’ room and across the hall, squeezing the doll as if it were a living child. She gained the stairs and was already in the first turn when she met the General coming up.

  He appeared out of nowhere. He was the biggest man Anna had ever seen, and he was taking the stairs two at a time and shaking the whole staircase. He was covered with dust from head to foot; the gold braid and stars on his coat were tarnished to the color of old brass. He creaked and clattered with sabre, canteen, an enormous pistol and a field-glasses case he was fumbling to get into while at the same time trying to hold on to his gauntlets. He was muttering curses through his beard; in his lean face, the black eyes glittered with evangelical fire. The General had the fever of battle in him, and he might have swept past Anna altogether had she not been standing frozen in the middle of the stairs. When he saw her, the General pulled up short and for an instant glared at the girl as if she were some unexpected enemy come suddenly upon him in the dusk.

  “Damnation!” he said. “Who is this?”

  His manner struck her like an open hand, and a blaze of indignation burst a bright star through her fear and she snapped, “Who! Who, indeed! I belong here, sir—I don’t suppose you can say the same?”

  “Well, by God—” began the General,
but she cut him off.

  “Who said you could come in here, using such language and tolling off up the stairs like you owned the place! And take your hat off in Miss Caroline’s house—it looks silly anyway!” The General was wearing a broad felt hat with a black ostrich plume nodding from the turned-up side; Anna had never been able to abide a feather in a man’s hat, and the sight of it riled her.

  “What do you mean?” said the General, sweeping off his hat and looking at it as if for the first time.

  “That feather there. It is ridiculous, sir.”

  The General considered the plume. “Hmmm,” he said. “But look here—what is your name?”

  “Don’t talk to me like a child,” said Anna, “and what is it to you anyway?”

  The General looked at her. “I stand corrected,” he said. “In my haste, I supposed you were a lady.”

  Anna opened her mouth to speak, but the General held up his hand. “I have acted badly. I passed your missus in the hall without so much as a word, and now I’ve insulted you. Fact is, I am a difficult man—but I am never rude on purpose. I don’t suppose you can say the same?”

  Anna looked away. “Oh,” she said.

  “Let us start over,” said the General. “I am Forrest. Perhaps you’ve heard of me?”

  Anna’s eyes widened. “You are the General Forrest?”

  “Just so.”

  Anna wore a silver Celtic cross on a silver chain about her neck; it had been her mother’s, in Ireland, in the old time. She closed her hand on it now, and bit her lip, and said, “Well, I am sorry for bein rude, I would be sorry even if you weren’t General Forrest. My name is Anna, and I must hinder you no longer.” She stepped back against the wall to let the General pass.

  But the General didn’t move. He watched her with his black eyes. “I must take a look at the fight, I mean to view it from the gallery yonder—as you just did, I expect?”

  “Yes,” said Anna, and looked back toward the top of the stairs, her hand tight around the silver cross. “There was nothin to see. Nothin but the smoke.”

  “Sure, now,” said the General, watching her. “Was that all you saw? Just smoke?”

  Anna dropped the doll, pressed her back against the wall and felt there the reverberation of the guns and heard again the snarling, like a mad beast turning on itself. “Oh, no,” she said, and her voice trembled. “No, that is not all I saw.”

  “Look at me, Miss Anna.”

  “General, I—”

  “There is not much time. Do me the kindness.”

  Anna looked, and in the General’s face saw the shadow of a weariness that she knew he would never lose, and a dark wisdom she had no desire to own.

  “Directly I will be gone,” said the General, “and it ain’t likely we will meet again in this life—so I will tell you this now, it is all I know, and it will have to answer. What you saw yonder was the last of a great army. You will forget about bein afraid one day, but you will never forget that. Not ever.”

  Anna nodded, not knowing what to say.

  The General picked up the doll. For a moment he peered into its cheerful painted face, then held it up to her. Anna took it and clutched it to her breast. “Thank you, sir,” she said.

  “Don’t mention it,” said the General. “And now, one last thing.” He tucked his gauntlets under his arm and plucked the ostrich plume from the band of his hat and held it out to her in his grimy fingers. “A remembrance,” he said.

  “A remembrance,” said Anna, and took it from his hand.

  The General moved past her on the stairs then, and she felt the strength in him, and smelled the stink of his wool and of horses and wood-smoke and death, and she knew she would not forget. At the landing he stopped, and turned, and looked at her for the last time.

  “And anyway,” he said, “there ain’t any shame in bein afraid. Not ever.”

  Then he was gone. Anna heard his boots on the landing; she did not see him again.

  So Anna did not blame the women of her time for what they had created; it was different only in kind from what she had made herself. And if the old soldiers wanted only to forgive, Anna understood that, too, though in her own memory she could no longer find anything that needed forgiving. In the sunlight by her cousin’s grave, she would touch the black ostrich plume in her hat—the plume that, like herself, grew a little older and a little more frayed every year—and think about what all of it meant to her. Down the hill slept the soldiers, and she would visit certain of them in a little while, and the thought of them—their faces, their voices, their particular ways—always made her smile. General Nathan Bedford Forrest himself told her once that she had seen the last of a great army, but he was wrong in that, for they still moved out there in the sunlight, all of them. He was right about one thing though: there was no shame in it, not ever.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  When Anna closed the bedroom door behind her, it was a little after five on the first day of December, 1864. By the clock it was well into morning, but the sky was not yet graying and the upper hall was as gloomy as it had been all night. There was light from the several hearths, and a few candles in the rooms, and a little glow caught in the stairwell. The effect of these murky flames was worse than darkness.

  Anna had no memory of passing this way before, when her cousin had brought her upstairs. Now, as her eyes adjusted to the gloom, she saw that the upper hall was carpeted with the bodies of men; they lay nestled like spoons, they sat with their heads in their hands, even the attic stairs were crowded with dark, huddled shapes as if a flock of enormous birds had come to roost there. Unlike the men on the gallery, these were not smoking and talking quietly; if they made any sound at all it was groaning, and their breathing raled in the stagnant air. Their hands moved restlessly, picking at their clothes, their faces, their wounds. Many were still and silent, and these were dead, Anna supposed. Somehow it seemed only natural that dead men should be lying all over her cousin McGavock’s hall.

  She wondered how all these had gotten up the stairs, and why they had even tried—there were no surgeons working up here. Anna knew that dogs and cats hunted a place to die when their time came, and she thought perhaps it was the same with men: some inner compass guided them with logic they did not understand themselves, until they reached the one and only place where the dream of life could make an end. Perhaps these men needed a high place, as far as possible from the earth and the worms and beetles that soon must claim them. Well, they had come a long way to die in this dark, smoky hall.

  Besides the room where the children slept, there were three bedrooms on the upper floor. These, too, were crowded with men, with the wounded and the dead. There were men everywhere, and it was so hot and close, and the thick air smelled of blood and bodies long unwashed. Before that night, Anna never knew that blood had a smell at all; now she wondered if she would ever smell anything else. And the stink of men. She had smelled men before, but it was always work-sweat or horse-sweat in the hot summertime. This was different, a sour, fetid smell, sickly and vile. Anna took her handkerchief from her sleeve and pressed it to her mouth—the handkerchief was stale with sweat, but at least it was her own.

  She knew she ought to open some windows and let in the cool air—but to do that she would have to go into those smoky, murmurous rooms. Alone. The only living thing, the only upright, moving thing. She could not do it. Already she felt eyes watching her through the dark rectangles of the doors, glistening faces turning toward her in the candlelight. The men in the hall, too, were beginning to notice her. I will send somebody up directly, she thought, and believed she had spoken it. She shuddered, and began to thread her way toward the stairs.

  She had to step carefully among the bodies, at times wedging her feet between them, feeling the clammy flesh or the rough, rancid wool against her ankles. Hands began to pluck at her skirt, hands beckoned from the pile: Over here. …Over this way. …Over here. Voices began to beg for water. She had only gone a little way when she felt
a hand close around her ankle; the fingers were cold and dry, the grip strong, and she was held fast. She was trapped in the middle of a carpet of men and, as she watched, it began to move, squirm, like the nest of cottonmouths she’d seen on the Elk River once. She was afraid to pull away, afraid to run, lest they drop on her from the ceiling and coil around her feet and pull her down, and the voices grew louder, more insistent: Water. …water, please, Missy. Over here. Water, for God’s sake. …

  Then, when she didn’t answer, didn’t move, the voices changed, some of them. Who are you, anyhow! cried one. Why don’t you do somethin, cried another. Why don’t you? Why don’t you?

  Leave her be, can’t you?

  Who said that? Who—

  “Stop it!” said Anna.

  Hey! Who are you anyhow?

  “Stop it!”

  What you mean, comin up here like a—

  “Shut your mouths, all of you!” Anna shrieked, and in that instant she went blind in a red fog that came from nowhere, that chilled her deeper than any fear until she might have killed them all if she could, rid the house and the land and the earth of all these ragged peckerwood strangers who pulled at her and cried their foul breath at her. She kicked at the face of the man who held her, he loosed his grip and tried to pull away but the press was too close and she kicked him again. “Take your hands off me!” she cried. “Take em off!”

  “They off, they off!” wailed the man.

  The others were silent, not moving now. The man put his hands in front of his face—it was a plain country face, the kind no one ever remembered long, but Anna would remember. “Damn you,” she said, her voice ragged, panting. “What you mean, grabbin hold of me like that?”

  “Nothin!” began the man. “I only want—”