The Black Flower Read online

  “I am played out,” said Bushrod.

  “I know,” said the Major. “It is all right with me. But, goin home, see that you don’t get captured—they ain’t givin paroles anymore. Now, let me trouble you for one of those Lucifers.”

  Bushrod passed the little box to his friend. “I got them from Jack Bishop. You remember him?”

  “Why, I should say so. I recall the time—”

  “I ain’t seen him since yesterday. Fact is, I am on my way to hunt for him now.”

  The Major was lighting his pipe. “What happened in the fight?” he asked around the pipestem. “You never told me.”

  “Damn if I know, R.K.,” said Bushrod. He rubbed his forehead. “I don’t recall much of it. Seems like we got up on their works though.”

  “Whose boys were you?”

  “Um, Captain Sullivan’s company of the Twenty-first. Mississippi, I mean. Adams’ Brigade. We was with Loring.”

  “Adams,” mused the Major. “Was there a big cotton gin behind the works, do you remember?”

  Bushrod waved his hand. “Somethin, yes. I think we got up on the works there, some of the boys did.”

  Major Cross took Bushrod by the arm. “Come.”

  He led Bushrod toward the west end of the gallery, where it jutted out beyond the house. Men were standing there, silent, and in the yard were many others, queued up like mourners at a funeral. They, too, were silent, and held their hats in their hands.

  “Make way, lads,” said the Major softly to the backs of those on the gallery. “Make way, there.”

  The men parted, and Major Cross led Bushrod to the front. “There is your General Adams,” he said.

  Five bodies were laid out on this end of the gallery, heels together, hands crossed on their breasts. They were disheveled, soiled, with that shapelessness that all the war’s Departed had, as if they’d been dropped from a great height into the midst of the living.

  “Which one?” asked Bushrod, for he honestly didn’t know. He had not seen much of General Adams in life.

  “There,” said the Major, pointing.

  Bushrod examined the dead face. “He was our general, he led us away to die, and died himself, and I don’t know him. Great God, this is a hard trade.”

  “He died on the works, I am told,” said the Major. “They say his mount is still up there, along with most of your brigade. You all made quite a show, you infantry.”

  “Perhaps Jack is up there,” said Bushrod. “He might be lookin for me up there.”

  “No doubt,” said the Major softly.

  “Who is that one?” Bushrod asked. He pointed to a body with an embroidered handkerchief over its face. The man’s legs were covered in mud, and he was barefoot.

  “Ah,” said the Major. “That is Cleburne.”

  “Impossible!” said Bushrod flatly. “Now you are mistaken.”

  “No, it is he,” said the Major. He gestured toward the men in the yard. “These were his boys. There is no mistake.”

  “General Cleburne,” said Bushrod. He wiped his eyes on the sleeve of his jacket. “My God, Major—I can’t. …”

  “I know,” said the Major. “You all were with him once, as I recall.”

  “Yes, we were his boys, oh, once upon a time. He was brave. He was the bravest, the best of them all, and now he is dead.”

  “He is among good company,” said the Major.

  “He came to our fire once. I watched him sittin there, and I thought, ‘the royal captain of this ruined band.’ That’s just what I thought. Now look at him! They didn’t even leave him his boots, fuckin sons of bitches. Look at him—and what’s the use in it? Tell me that, Major.”

  Cross took Bushrod’s arm and turned him away. “If I could tell you that, would it make a farthin’s worth of difference?”

  “Maybe. Maybe it would goddammit.” Bushrod wanted to look back at the General again, but the men had already closed around him.

  “Look here,” said the Major. “Why don’t you lay up for a while. Then you can find Jack—”

  “Jack is not dead!” said Bushrod suddenly.

  “I never said he was.”

  Bushrod began to rub his forehead again. By now he’d rubbed some of the skin off, and his fingers left little smears of blood.

  “You are played out, ain’t you,” said Major Cross. “Well, go hunt for our old pard then—but don’t you all go runnin off until I see you again. Jack Bishop still owes me three dollars he borrowed off me in Memphis once. We was at the—”

  “See you again?” said Bushrod. “Not in Tennessee, we won’t.”

  “Shoot,” said the Major. “We’ll be back through here in about a week with the whole Yankee nation on our heels, see if we ain’t. Probably pass you on the road—mind you don’t get trampled.”

  Bushrod laughed.“You mind, and watch your ramblin ass.”

  “Never fear,” said the Major. He smiled his broad smile, the corners of his eyes crinkling. “The day ain’t dawned I can’t outrun a tribe of cheese-eaters.”

  The two soldiers, officer and man, shook hands on the gallery. Bushrod went down the steps into the yard, walked a few paces and turned again. “Major!”

  “Yes, old boy?”

  Bushrod slouched to attention and raised his hand, palm outward, in the nonchalant salute of the Southern infantryman. “The Army of Tennessee,” he said.

  The Major grinned and raised his hand in return.

  Bushrod turned back into the yard. He was dizzy and sick at heart, and the whole littered field of Franklin lay before him. But no matter, for Jack was out there somewhere, and it was still early in the day. In fact, Bushrod needn’t have worried; though he didn’t know it, he had but a little way to go.

  The sun rose and burned away the ghostly mist that clung to the hollows. It promised a fair day, and a cool one.

  Anna Hereford stood at the balustrade of the upper gallery and looked toward the trees where she’d glimpsed the battle the day before. Already, she thought, it belonged to yesterday. The Big Thing had happened, and now it was passing away like the cars on the Nashville railroad, leaving them all behind to clean up the shambles, to remember or to forget as they chose.

  Major Cross, the provost, had brought order to the upper rooms. The dead were removed, the quick (including Bushrod Carter) shooed downstairs. The badly wounded were laid out in rows to await the attention of the surgeons who were setting up now in the front bedroom, under the windows where the light was fair. Anna had opened the windows herself, flung open all the windows and shutters in the upstairs rooms. It was still bad, and men still suffered, and plenty of blood would soak into the floors yet—but it would not be the smoky purgatory she had feared in the night.

  Now Anna stood on the gallery, allowing herself to believe in the simple, faithful coming of the day. She’d washed her face and hair, put on her stockings, changed her dress. The dress she wore now was yellow, a summer dress really, but she had wanted a bright color. So she stood on the gallery in her fresh yellow dress, looking out toward the river and the gray, barren trees, and wondered what she would keep in her heart.

  She thought of the battle and tried to fix in her mind what it had been like: the smoke, the demon wail of the Rebels and the hurrahs of the Northern men, the unbroken reverberation of the guns. She would keep that always.

  She thought, too, on the long night watches, on the faces and voices and hands suspended in candlelight, and the blood. She thought of the bearded man, the sufferers on the landing, the way her cousin’s hands had looked when the dawn first touched them. These things, too, she would keep.

  She thought of Bushrod Carter. She took his silk handkerchief from her sleeve, the one he had given her, still crusted with his blood. A memento of the battle, he had said. For the fair, he had said. Anna blushed at the memory. What business did he have saying that? She picked at the dried blood, thought I will never get this out. But that was all right, there were plenty of things you couldn’t wash blood ou
t of: handkerchiefs, hardwood floors, memory. Still you went on, taking the blood, taking whatever else you could.

  The thought of Bushrod made Anna’s nerves flutter in a way she would not have expected; she put it off to weariness, to release from the long night, to the knowledge that all her feelings hovered just under the surface on this morning when the world she had known was vanished forever. Yet even as she dismissed her feelings, she knew it was a lie—convenient and practical and safe, but a lie nevertheless. Bushrod Carter spoke to her from behind a door she’d not opened in a long time, and would not have opened by herself. Damn Circumstance then, who had brought him out of the night—him, among all this ragged host—and laid him at the foot of the stairs.

  When Major Cross had chased Bushrod downstairs, she had almost stopped him. But then she’d not been ready to admit that there was something unfinished, some words not yet spoken that would send him out of her life as abruptly as he’d entered it. That was the thing, she told herself: she had to close the door, put him away with that other face, that other voice, that dwelt in the darkness there, and fix the lock again. But that, too, was a lie.

  The fact was, she wanted to talk to him. She had known so few soldiers really, and none like him—they were all a mystery to her that the events of the night had only deepened. Maybe this boy could explain it all to her: why they had come, how they could do what they did, why they brought ruin in the name of something else. Yet even that was not all, and she smiled at the notion that even she would have to admit it sooner or later, so it might as well be now. She wanted to see if he would call her fair again.

  Anna laughed out loud and chided herself for a fool. The boy would be gone tomorrow, most likely was gone already, out looking for his regiment so he could go with them across the river, chasing after the Yankees and whatever it was that drew them on. Gone for good, having closed the door himself whether she was ready or not. And that was all right. It would have to be all right.

  Down below, the yard was crowded with soldiers—Anna could hardly imagine it otherwise now. With daylight there was more talk among them, even laughter, as if they were just beginning to understand that the night was over and they were alive. But there were still the suffering ones, and the dying ones, and the bloody-aproned surgeons moving among them. She wondered about the solemn men who stood hats-in-hand staring at the lower gallery—she did not know about the generals laid out there. A movement caught her eye, it was a horseman, walking his mount carefully among the wounded. No one seemed to pay him any mind; he crossed the yard and moved slowly toward the oak grove beyond. He stopped at the edge, looked back, then disappeared into the trees. At the same moment, Anna saw Bushrod.

  Damn, she thought. He was not gone after all; there he was, still in reach of her voice. He was crossing the yard, smoking, a lanky boy in a short gray jacket and awful checkered breeches, so much like them all and yet not like them, because he belonged to her in a way none of the others did. The thought shocked her but she let it stand, she might as well admit that, too. She opened her mouth to call his name, but it was too late, he had already entered the grove at the place where the horseman had gone.

  She stood for a moment more, pulling the silk handkerchief through her fingers. What business did he have calling her fair? How did he presume to touch her, wipe the blood from her face, speak so kindly? How could he dare to cross the yard under her very eyes when she thought he was gone for good?

  “Well, damn,” she said aloud, and turned quickly toward the tall open window by which they came and went to the gallery.

  Nebo Gloster was still propped against the wall where she had left him, his bony, bloody feet stuck straight out before him. Anna realized that he, too, was looking out toward the grove, though she couldn’t imagine what he saw. She did not think of him as a soldier, could not understand how anyone ever had, yet here he was just the same.

  “Nebo,” she said, “what makes you men do what you do?”

  Nebo looked up with an awkward grin and shifted uncomfortably. He had his ramrod across his knees, and now he held it up for Anna to see. “I’d of never tolt it in a hundred years,” he said. “Ain’t that Bushrod somethin?”

  “Oh, he is indeed,” said Anna, and smiled, and touched the man’s shoulder, and passed quickly into the house.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  When it came to religion, Bushrod Carter tried to keep everything simple. God was in heaven, Christ was the Redeemer, faith was more important than works, the saints looked out for you. He believed, too, that the Almighty took a personal interest in the affairs of men. His life over the past three years had not shaken this belief, though it well might have—Bushrod had pondered the contradictions until his head hurt, but he had never figured out how God could look down on such madness and not take a hand. The best he could do was to remind himself that men made their own troubles mostly, and that God spent a lot of time grieving Himself.

  As a Freemason, Bushrod was provided with a useful metaphor: God as the Great Architect, continually nudging the world toward a design He envisioned, while the little entered apprentices scurrying about below could only see what was in front of their noses. As a student of literature, he knew something about the Fates, who seemed to relieve God of a lot of responsibility. Finally, as an Episcopalian, Bushrod believed in the efficacy of prayer. The combination of these various perspectives accommodated nearly every occasion that arose.

  Regarding prayer, Bushrod felt it was the petitioner’s part to be reasonable. For example, it would be presumptuous of him to ask that Virgil C. or General Cleburne be returned to life, or that the Strangers suddenly lay down their arms and open the gates of Nashville to Major R.K. Cross. However, Bushrod thought it perfectly reasonable to bring up the matter of finding Jack Bishop.

  Just within the oak grove, but out of sight of the men in the yard, Bushrod knelt stiffly on one knee and made the sign of the cross. The sun filtered down through the leafless branches, through the weaving smoke of the fires. Crows fretted by the river and somewhere a horse was scuffing the dead leaves. Bushrod looked up into the interlaced canopy above him and tried to put away all the things that were on his mind, so that nothing dwelt there but the pure light he believed God to be. It was, of course, impossible, but he studied the sky and imagined God to be listening from some rampart far beyond, and at last he began to pray.

  Through all his life (around forty years—even he didn’t know for sure) Nebo Gloster had seen very few women. His mother died borning him; the mulatto midwife, drunk, had squeezed Nebo’s head pulling him out, then danced and lit candles while the mother bled to death. His father—goatish, ancient, crazed with corn liquor—killed the mulatto with an axe and threw her to the gars in the Homochitto River. Unfortunately, the full moon burst over the cypress just as the woman’s body split the water; moreover, she floated face up, turning and turning in the sluggish current. The old man took these things together as a sign. Shaking with terror, he brought a full jug from the cabin and locked himself in the woodshed; within an hour’s time he had emptied the jug, smashed it, and gouged his eyes out with a shard. By daylight he was dead.

  So the infant Nebo was raised by his two hulking brothers and a wet nurse they stole from a plantation outside of Woodville. For his first eight years, the nurse—sullen, silent, vicious as a cottonmouth—was the only woman Nebo knew. Finally she made her escape into the Homochitto swamps; the brothers hunted her down with dogs and shot her. They took her fingernails and some of her hair and made a ju-ju bag and hung it on the cabin door so her ghost would stay away.

  When he was nine, Nebo went to Woodville for the first time. Then, and on his subsequent yearly visits, he fled from anything, white or black, that resembled a woman. Sometimes, in town, he would watch through the gray shrunken boards of a stable or woodshed while his brothers thrashed and panted over some negro wench. They caught him at it once and, laughing, rubbed his face in the damp, fish-smelling patch between the negro’s legs. He ne
ver watched again.

  In time, the brothers disappeared. One went into the swamp and never came out again; the other cut himself on a piece of rusty tin and died of blood-poisoning, raving (before his jaws locked tight) that the ghost of the old nurse had come after all and was baring its shriveled dugs at the foot of the bed. It was winter when this brother died, and Nebo buried him beside the old man and the long-forgotten mother in the patch of ground where they raised their corn.

  So Nebo lived on in the Homochitto bottoms, planting a little corn and cane, trapping muskrats and minding his own business until the roving Rebel cavalry caught him and introduced him to the wide world. Since then, he’d seen more women than he ever thought the world contained.

  From most of these—especially the hard-looking trollops who hung around the camps—Nebo kept his distance, not so much from fear as from habit. But as time went on he began to detect a softness, a kindness, about some women to which he responded like a stray dog. He allowed himself to be lured to cabin doors and yard gates where a woman might give him a biscuit or some cornpone or a bit of salt pork; these gifts he would accept with diffidence, hanging his head in awkward silence while the woman spoke kindly to him, calling him brave, wishing him well. He’d gotten along just fine then, and decided that the thing to do was to avoid women when he could, and let them have their way when he couldn’t, and maybe he could get back home again without any trouble in that regard. And he might have, too, had not Anna come along.

  Anna Hereford hung in the empty, twilit reaches of Nebo’s mind like a new star. When, a little while before, she had taken his arm and led him out to the gallery, Nebo had been terrified and speechless. Where she touched him, even through the fabric of the frock coat, the place burned as if a coal had been pressed there. He could still feel it, in fact, and the place on his shoulder where she’d just now laid her hand. Having lived in the woods all his life, Nebo had a rarefied sense of smell, and now the smell of Anna Hereford surrounded him like a cloud of sugar bees: the smell of the glycerin and rosewater she had rubbed on her hands, the smell of her hair, the mysterious essence of the girl herself that made her different from anyone he’d ever known. Her voice, her face, the particular way she moved—all these things illuminated an unused and unprepared chamber of Nebo’s heart. He did not recognize the light, nor give it a name, but he could not ignore it.