The Black Flower Page 20

  The girl looked away. “I see. Well, you must do what is best for you. I only thought. …I only thought there has been enough killin for one day.”

  Now there’s a novel observation, thought Bushrod, but he kept himself from saying it just in time. He looked toward the open door where, if he wanted to, he could see Virgil C. lying in the grass. Then he looked at the girl again. She was frowning, turning her silver cross in her fingers. “Anna,” he said.

  The girl didn’t look at him. “Finish your coffee,” she said softly. “Then we better go on up, so you can be about your business.”

  Nebo and Hattie and Winder had moved the pallet near the fire, and now they sat cross-legged on it and pondered the ramrods on the hearth.

  “I should like to know,” said Hattie, “why you think one of these is yours, and why it makes any difference anyhow.”

  “Well,” said Winder, “any fool ought to know that.”

  “Very well, smart pants,” said Hattie. “Suppose you tell us.”

  “Well,” said Winder. He looked at Nebo.

  “I figured as much,” said Hattie.

  Nebo held up his hand. “There is a tally to be made,” he said.

  “A what?”

  Nebo scratched his long chin; it made a bristly sound that set Hattie’s nerves on edge. “That’s what he told me—said there had to be a tally soon or late, said I had to find the ramrod, and not just any one would do, he said—”

  “Who said?” asked Hattie.

  “A man,” said Nebo. He turned to Hattie with a puzzled look. “Like. …like when you carry cane to the press, and everything got to be tallied up.” Nebo’s face brightened suddenly. “We used to go up to Woodville with our cane—was a man there what didn’t have any legs, only a plank with wheels on it he used to scoot around on—”

  Winder, bored with the ramrod question, found the idea of a man on wheels to be of interest. “How did the man get up on his porch?” he asked.

  “Well, he didn’t have no porch,” said Nebo. “Lived in a bar’l. We boys used to torment him—one time some big boys set him off down a hill, warn’t but one hill in Woodville—”

  “That was mean,” said Hattie.

  “I thought so at the time,” said Nebo.

  “Why do you have to make a tally now?”

  Nebo’s face went sad again, and he turned once more to the fire. He stared into it a long time while Hattie and Winder waited. Without knowing it, they grew closer together, all three of them huddling in the firelight. Hattie could smell the man’s odor. He smelled like a dog that had been out in the rain. Winder smelled like smoke and little-boy sweat. The fire flickered and danced and threw their shadows on the wall; outside, something scraped across the boards of the landing. It came right up to the door and stopped. “Sister. …” whispered Winder. The girl was about to reply when Nebo Gloster opened his mouth and screamed.

  The sound of it came flapping out of the dark like the sudden swoop of an owl; there were no words but the language was older than words—it was fear, a tongue children understand better than anyone. Nebo howled, flung his hands up while his mouth worked to make the sound and his eyes grew wide. Hattie, her heart pounding, knew what he was seeing: something beyond the fire, something squatting on the other side. She had seen it herself in the nights. Winder pressed against her and hid his face. “Don’t,” Hattie said, pushing at Nebo’s arm. “Stop it! You are scarin us!”

  “I seen it ail once,” said Nebo. His breath was coming in snanow gasps and his eyes glittered wet in the firelight. Hattie realized he was crying, the tears began to roll down his cheeks in big drops like the rain in summer did. “Oh, I seen it happen—it busted his head open an’. …an’ I run, I run.” His voice dropped then, and he pointed with his long forefinger at whatever he saw across the fire. “I run, run like everything, wanted. …wanted to get somewheres away from where it was. So I run away out into the fields and pretty soon it was all fire out there, fire and smoke, and I run right through it. Then I hid out. Found some little woods—it was a good place, but he found me after dark—”

  The children watched him, feeling the dark coming.

  “Oh, yes,” said Nebo, his voice quieter now. “I hearn his horse comin through the dead leaves—chuff, chuff, chuff—and I hearn the creakin of his harness—he was lookin for me. Then I seen him by the light of the stars—seen him turn his head at me, seen his eyes, seen the stars through his head where it was blowed clean away—”

  “I want to go, sister,” said the boy.

  “Hush, Winder,” said Hattie.

  Nebo’s hands shaped something in the air above them. “He told me all about what I done back yonder, said there would have to be a tally for that—but I couldn’t remember, it were somethin awful. It weren’t my fault.” He looked at Hattie. “It weren’t my fault, was it?”

  “I’m sure not,” said Hattie in a whisper.

  “What’d you do?” sniffed the boy.

  Nebo shook his head. “I never meant to do it—honest injun. Them boys, they was good to me mostly—”

  Nebo Gloster began to sob. “I got to find it,” he said, and fluttered his hands over the ramrods on the hearth. Winder, too, began to cry, and Hattie wished she could as well, but Mama and Anna were not here and there was no one else, so she patted Nebo’s arm and said, “Hush, now. Hush, and we will find it.”

  “We won’t never!” wailed Nebo.

  Hattie remembered the little oval of glass in her hand. “Now don’t,” she said to Nebo. “Hush, hush. You want to look through the glass? You want to look at the fire through the glass?” She held out her hand, nudged the man with it. “See?”

  Nebo’s crying died away, he whimpered and coughed and finally blew his nose on the tail of his officer’s frock. Then he looked shyly at the girl’s outstretched hand and the dark glimmer of the lens. “Well, you don’t care?” he said.

  “’Course not,” said Hattie. “Here.” She took his hand and pressed the glass into his palm.

  Nebo turned the glass over in his hand.

  “Go ahead,” said Hattie. “It’s magic, just like you said.”

  Nebo’s face relaxed. He lifted the glass to the fire. “This is the derndest thing,” he said.

  Anna followed Bushrod up the stairs. She let him go as slow as he needed; all the way he clung to the banister like an old woman. The treads creaked under his bare feet.

  Anna understood that she had probably made a mistake. Down below, when she had asked a simple question about the man’s pistol, a dark fire had jumped up in him. Not so much on the outside; he had stopped himself, or seemed to, and backed away from it. But she’d seen it on the inside, licking up into his good eye, the flame like a serpent’s tongue out of some deep place she couldn’t know about. She ought to have walked away from him then, found somebody sane, or at least a little less mad, just walked away, leave him talking to himself. And she would have too, except he said her name.

  Anna, he said. That was all. There was not even the courtly “Miss” that most men tacked onto it, nothing but the name itself, as if there were no distance at all between them. She ought to have been insulted, probably would be one day when time had rebuilt all the fences that people kept around themselves, that the battle and the long night had broken down and scattered. She would be insulted one day, remembering, telling how a strange boy in the ruins of the hall had spoken so freely—

  But maybe not. Maybe she would remember it in another way. Maybe she would keep it for herself, and never tell it at all.

  However it would be, away off in that other time, right now the boy was alive and toiling ahead of her up the stairs, and no doubt the dark flame was still eating at him, and if that were so, she had probably made a mistake and God might know what was going to happen but it wasn’t likely He would tell her, just let her find out for herself. If I could only cuss, she thought wearily. If only I knew the words, and how to use them—

  The soldier stopped, and Anna ra
n into him. “Oh,” she said. “What’s the matter?”

  The boy didn’t answer. He was breathing hard.

  “Are you dizzy? You need to rest?”

  He turned his face to her. Yes, it was there, still flickering: it was on the outside now, in the lines of his face and in his voice when he spoke.

  “Jesus,” he said. “You come up here beside me and stay close.”

  Anna realized then that they had come to the landing. She moved up beside him, took his arm without thinking, not caring now if she’d made a mistake or not as long as he was there to hold on to because if he wasn’t there would be no going on.

  It was even worse than she remembered. Daylight had found its way here somehow, but it was cheerless and gray and held no promise of anything and it clung to the walls and the shapes of men like a gray scum. It illuminated the silence—no moaning or talk or babble here now, no movement—and the hundreds of eyes in the blackened faces that turned towards them, the dull, resentful, unblinking eyes of dying foxes. Wood-smoke, riven by a single spear of light from a broken shutter, hovered in a cloud on the ceiling. The smoke had run the wasps away, it stung the eyes and choked the breath and hung heavy with the stink of blood. On the other side of the hall, a thousand leagues away, was the closed door behind which Hattie and Winder lay sleeping.

  “That door,” whispered Anna. “That is where we must go.”

  But the boy didn’t seem to hear. He was looking out over the landing, his breath coming hard, and she felt the muscles in his arm go taut. “Look at em,” he said. “I never saw anything like it. Like so many hogs crawled up here to die.”

  She felt his arm move, looked down, saw him draw the pistol from his waistband. “Wait a minute—” she said.

  “Look at em,” he said. “Think they can just crawl up here—”

  “You don’t have to do that,” said Anna and she put her hand on the pistol and he jerked it away. His injured eye had come unglued and it stared at her like a red marble. His nose was running blood again, and when he grinned at her she saw that his teeth were rimmed with scarlet.

  “You don’t know,” he said, grinning. “You don’t know anything about it.”

  “Please,” she said. “Bushrod. Please.”

  “Oh, no,” he said. He waved the pistol. “Look at em! Look at what they come to! And Virgil C. layin out there in the grass—”

  “Who? Bushrod, don’t—I just need you to clear a way for me, I just wanted—”

  “Oh, yes,” said Bushrod Carter. “Oh, I’ll clear a way all right, they got to be cleansed of this, they got to be. …they got to know—”

  “Don’t! Don’t!” Anna pleaded, pulling his arm. But he jerked that away too, and suddenly she was standing alone, watching him move out onto the landing, and all she could do was go after him because the mistake was hers and there couldn’t be any going back down.

  The first man he came to he kicked viciously in the ribs. “Get up!” he said, and kicked the man again and the man cursed him and pushed away and Bushrod cocked the pistol and jammed the muzzle against the man’s forehead. “Do you want to die right here? Call me a son bitch!” and the man rose to his hands and knees, then to his feet, the pistol following.

  “Jesus Christ!” said the man, and lurched toward the stairwell.

  “What is the matter with you?” cried Anna. “Don’t you see—”

  The wounded man collapsed and fell headlong down the stairs and Bushrod watched him, grinning. He shook his head violently, as if to clear it, and drops of blood spattered on Anna’s cheek. “We are all in hell,” he told her, waving the pistol. “This is the place they told you about—they are all dead, all the boys are dead—”

  “No!” said Anna. “They are not all—”

  But Bushrod raised the pistol, and for an instant she thought he would strike her and she raised her hands.

  “Don’t be tellin me, goddammit,” he said. “But don’t you worry—I can raise the dead, I done it lots of times—make em walk again, just like before.” He turned again, forgetting her, and shouted into the hall. “How ’bout it boys! You think you could crawl up here and die and all them dead on the works yonder, like soldiers? Well, think again, by God! Rise up, it’s Judgment Day!”

  He began to kick among the prostrate men, at those who were hurt and those who were not, until voices cried out and the whole mass began to move, writhe, again just like Anna remembered. Bushrod struck with the pistol, kicking and swearing, and Anna followed him toward the closed door and she saw men beginning to rise, shaking their fists and threatening, but afraid of the pistol and the madness, and other men crawling about blindly, moaning, uttering names of ones who might help them if they were only there. And the dead, meanwhile, watched it all with cloudy, indifferent eyes. One of these lay abandoned in Bushrod’s path, a middle-aged man who might have been a storekeeper once upon a time, or a bank clerk, or a schoolmaster. Bushrod regarded him with disgust. “Get up, damn you!” he said, and kicked the body, but it only sighed and lay unresisting and Bushrod began to kick it again and again. “Get up, goddamn you! It’s the last reveille, by God!” and hammered at the dead face with his heel until something broke.

  She could stand no more. With a cry, Anna pushed her way into the hall, it was only a few steps now and in an instant she was at the door, fumbling for the knob; she flung open the door, nearly fell through it, slammed it behind her, and there were Hattie and Winder and—

  “Anna!” cried the children, and ran to her and wrapped their arms around her legs, almost knocking her down, and she was looking at a fantastic figure swaying by the fireplace, a man in a straw hat with shoes dangling from his neck—

  “Hidy!” said the man.

  And she and the children were pushed into the room by the opening door and the fantastic man fell to his knees and put up his hands and wailed, “Not me! I didn’t do nothin!” and Bushrod was there beside her, panting, his face wild with recognition—

  “Nebo Gloster, you son of a bitch!” howled Bushrod, and raised the pistol.

  CHAPTER TEN

  “Enough!” cried Anna. “Now that is enough! It is murder, and in front of these children!”

  “Oh, call it what you will,” said Bushrod. His voice was calm, he held the pistol almost casually in Nebo’s face. Nebo himself knelt with his eyes closed, waiting for the last sound he would ever hear.

  Anna pushed the children toward the bed, motioning with her hands, but her eyes never left Bushrod’s face. She took a step toward him. “Yes,” she said. “I will call it what it is—murder and butchery. You are a butcher, just like all the rest.”

  “You are right,” said Bushrod. “Murder and butchery is my trade, and I am damn good at it.”

  Nebo groaned. “He tolt me there’d be a tally! He said the time would come!”

  “Shut up,” said Bushrod.

  Anna moved another step closer. Bushrod tried to ignore her, but his eyes kept traveling to her face. “Let me alone,” he said. “You don’t know—”

  Anna was close enough to touch him now. “Know what?” she said.

  “You don’t know—”

  “Know what!” Anna spat the words in Bushrod’s face. “I’ll tell you what I know! That you are mad, that you are a coward and a murderer! You call yourself a soldier! You are not fit to wear that coat, to be in the same house with—”

  “No, he is the murderer, goddammit!” cried Bushrod. “He is the coward! He shot Virgil C. and run off!”

  “Oh, it’s a-comin,” moaned Nebo Gloster. “It’s a-comin all right—”

  “Shut up, Nebo,” said Bushrod. “Just shut up a minute!”

  “Look at him,” said Anna. “Look at him, Bushrod. Whoever he is, whatever he did, you cannot kill him and still call yourself a man.”

  “But—”

  “No,” said Anna. She put out her hand, closed it over the frame of the pistol, her thumb under the cocked hammer. “There has been enough killin for one day.”

/>   Bushrod began to rub his forehead with the back of his injured hand. He sniffed at the blood in his nose. When he exhaled, a bright red bubble popped at his nostril. Then he looked at Anna. “Take your hand away,” he said quietly.

  “Bushrod—”

  “Take your hand away. I got to lower the hammer.”

  She pulled back her hand and closed it around the silver cross. Bushrod lowered the hammer with the web of his thumb; he regarded the pistol a moment, then dropped it to the floor. Anna watched his face slacken, the tightness around his jaws fall away, the dark flame gutter out at last. He looked around, puzzled, as if he’d just awakened in a strange room. “Where is this place?” he said.

  Anna took a step back. “You son of a bitch,” she said, and struck him hard, backhanded, across the face.

  “God a’mighty!” said Winder from behind the bed.

  “Winder McGavock!” said Hattie.

  There was an interval of silence then, punctuated by a whir of machinery in the bowels of the mantel clock. The clock struck ten times, and they waited in the tableau until it ceased. Then Bushrod let out his breath. “Oh, me,” he said. “I didn’t think it was so late.”

  “That clock hasn’t ever worked,” Anna said softly.

  Nebo Gloster lowered his hands and regarded Bushrod with suspicion. “Say, ain’t you gone shoot me?” he asked.

  “Jesus Christ,” said Bushrod. “No, I ain’t gone shoot you. Great God.”

  Hattie and Winder came out from behind the bed. “You ain’t goin to sure enough?” asked Winder.

  “Don’t say ‘ain’t’,” said Hattie.

  The children went to Nebo where he was still kneeling on the floor. Hattie took his bony hand.

  “It’s all right now,” she said. “Cousin Anna has saved you.”

  “I thought you was a goner for sure,” said Winder.

  “Well,” said Nebo. “Say, what become of that glass?”

  Meanwhile, Bushrod had moved to the bed and was clinging to the bedpost as he had to the newel post down below.