The Black Flower Read online

  “Listen here, Mister Bevins,” said the Major. “In time of war and tumults, what is the role of the hght horse?”

  The man rolled his eyes elaborately, as if pondering an essential truth. Finally he held up a finger. “In time of war and tumults, the role of the light horse is. …to seek out the enemy, smite him soundly in the ass and ride away rejoicing.”

  “It’s time we were at that again, don’t you think?”

  “Ah, Christ, Major,” said Bevins, “I’d nearly as soon be married again as spend another night in this damnable place—God rest all their souls, by God.”

  “That’s the way I see it, sir,” said the Major. “So I want you to get up on this fat, indolent prize and go see if you can find our General Forrest. Present him my compliments, and say that Major Cross requests orders. Mind, now: do not say ‘Major Cross the Provost’ but only ‘Major Cross.’ He will ask you where this Major Cross thinks he is, and you must tell him only that Major Cross and his detachment are just out of town on the Lewisburg Pike. He will storm and swear—don’t pay it any mind—then he will either clap you in irons or send you to some lesser mortal who will tell you how to rendezvous with the main body. This last is the only information I am interested in. It is all I care to know. Understand?”

  “Major, I am your man,” said Bevins. He put his boot into the hooded stirrup and hoisted himself into the saddle and it seemed to the Major he ought to be able to see into Alabama from up there.

  “Forrest is north of the river,” said the Major. “And see you don’t linger in town.” He slapped the big horse on the rump and watched Bevins canter away toward the village and the river he would have to cross.

  Suddenly the sun was not as warm as it had been. The Major turned his face toward it, saw that it was climbing into the high clouds. He could feel the weather coming.

  When the Major was a boy, there hung in the parlor of his father’s house a lurid chromo of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow. Major Cross had not thought of it in years, but he remembered it now: the ragged soldiers leaning into the driving snow, their feet wrapped in rags, the wind whipping the capes of their greatcoats. All their colors were cased, the eagle-tipped staffs rimed with frost. In the foreground a soldier was dying, his anguished face turned to the sky while the column passed behind him. As a boy, Major Cross despised that chromo—it reeked of defeat, end, humiliation, and it made him cold to his very bones. And, because he despised it, he made himself stand before it in long, solitary vigils—especially in winter when the parlor was closed and cold and silent—staring at the soldier who was always dying, hating him, hating the others who did not know they were dying too. The boy swore he would never let himself come to such an end.

  And now, here he was.

  The Major smiled in appreciation of the joke that Destiny had played on him. He could see himself in the chromo now, one of the mounted officers swaddled against the cold, swept along on the ebb tide of a ruined army. He could also see, as clearly as if it were already a memory, the campaign on which he was about to embark. Ambushes in the icy, death-silent woods. Running fights over frozen roads, the horses slipping, stumbling in the ruts, some of them going down by the head, pitching their riders. Videttes, half-dead from the cold, lifted bodily from their saddles and carried to the fire—if there was a fire. The wind would whip the capes of the troopers’ greatcoats, breath freezing in their mustaches, hands raw and red—racking coughs, headaches, sodden blankets, no tents, no forage—and on the retreat, desperate rear-guard actions far from the main body, where men would die to gain a little time for other men they did not know, and who would never know them. Charges and countercharges, the horses’ hooves spattering in the ice—a brief uproar of pistols, carbines, shotguns, the clatter of horse artillery—then silence again, the riders vanished, the blood of the dead men freezing in the leaves—

  The Major had seen it all before and in a little while would see it all again—only now he’d come full circle from the boy in the parlor who hated the men who lost. Now he was one of them, and in a way he was glad, reheved to have it decided. Let it commence, he thought—let us all cross the river and see what it is to die—

  He turned abruptly, collided with a soldier who had come up behind him. The Major swore and took a step back. Then he recognized the man. “Well,” he said softly.

  “Beg pardon, R.K.,” said Bushrod. “Do you know where I could find a shovel?”

  Nebo Gloster dug the grave among the oaks, not far from the clearing where Jack had died. The ground was soft but the roots proved troublesome, and it took him almost all the morning. Meanwhile, Bushrod Carter slept under a sweetgum tree. He had not meant to, but the moment he leaned his head back against the trunk he was asleep. Nebo paid him no mind but went on digging, wide and deep. From time to time soldiers came to watch; they would stand and smoke and talk quietly among themselves, then go away again. Some offered to spell Nebo, but he paid them no mind either.

  It was almost noon when the job was finished. Nebo climbed out of the hole, thrust the shovel into the mound of dirt, and put on his frock coat again. It was hard to get the coat on, for he was stiff and sore and could hardly straighten his back. Then he hobbled over to the blanket that lay over Jack and Virgil C. and knelt and pulled the blanket back a little way.

  Jack Bishop was peaceful. Anna had cleaned his face and brushed his hair; Bushrod and Nebo had carried him here and laid him out in the usual way. Virgil C. was another matter.

  Anna had gone with Bushrod to find his comrade, just as he had hoped she would. When they couldn’t find him in the front yard, Bushrod was agitated, but Anna led him around, back where they found Virgil C. just as the provost’s men had left him: still on his face, arms flung out, rigid as a plank. They found some men to help; Bushrod would not allow him to be turned over, so Virgil C. was carried face-down into the grove, where he was laid beside Jack and the both of them covered with a blanket. Then Bushrod had pointed with the stick he’d been using as a cane. “We must make the grave here,” he told Nebo. “Big enough for them both.” Now Nebo had dug the grave, and for a moment he squatted on his heels and peered at the men who would fill it.

  The tally had been made, somehow. Something was saved, though Nebo could not remember how it all happened. But he didn’t care; he felt quiet, peaceful, he felt as if nothing could ever happen to him again.

  Then he heard movement and looked up, expecting Miss Anna, who said she would bring their dinner. Instead, an officer was sitting his horse among the trees, watching him. Nebo got to his feet. “What you want now?” he whispered.

  The officer was silent.

  Without taking his eyes away, Nebo bent and pulled the blanket back over the two dead soldiers. “You seen em,” he said, “now let em be.”

  He began to step backward toward the tree where Bushrod lay. He looked back once to check where it was, and when he turned again the officer was gone.

  Nebo sat close to Bushrod and pulled his knees up under his chin. He was sitting there when Anna came.

  She had brought biscuits, a little ham, some dried apple slices, all in a lard bucket with a dishrag thrown over it. She brought a boiler of coffee, and under one arm she carried the wooden lid of an ammunition box. She tucked it all between the roots of the gum tree and sat down beside Bushrod.

  “Has he been sleepin all the time you been diggin?” she asked Nebo.

  “Well, they wa’nt but one shovel anyhow, Miss Anna.”

  She picked up Bushrod’s stick and poked him in the ribs. “Hey, boy—rise and shine!”

  Bushrod lurched upright and swore. Anna shook her head. “I do not believe I ever heard that particular word before,” she said.

  “For God’s sake,” said Bushrod.

  Anna spread the dishrag out and lay the meager rations before them. “Now, go ahead, boys,” she said. “I had a bite down at the cookhouse—they had a roast goose and dressin down there—”

  “And chicken and sweet corn and coll
ards, too,” said Bushrod.

  “Yes, and peas, two or three kinds, and barbecue, a whole hog—”

  “My lands,” said Nebo, his eyes gone wide.

  “No, no, no,” said Bushrod. “It ain’t really true, Nebo. We was dreamin, is all.”

  So Bushrod and Nebo ate together, ate slowly, making it last, and passed the coffee boiler between them, and Anna watched them, and when they were done she folded the dishrag again.

  “We are obliged to you,” said Bushrod. “It’s not many that fare so well today.”

  “It is little enough, but you are welcome,” Anna said. “I brought you some paint like you asked, it’s in the bucket.”

  So Bushrod looked in the bucket, found a little pot of white paint and a narrow brush. He took these and the lid of the ammunition box and went off a few paces and sat cross-legged on the ground. Nebo followed and watched, fascinated, as Bushrod began to work.

  “How you know to do that?” asked Nebo.

  “Why, this ain’t nothin,” said Bushrod. “I am skilled in all the arts.”

  He winked at Anna, and she blushed and turned away. She walked to the grave, but she didn’t look at it, she looked at the sky and the high clouds sailing overhead. In a little while, Bushrod called to her. She walked back slowly, rubbing her arms.

  “Look,” said Bushrod, and held up the box lid. On it, he had painted:

  Jack Bishop

  Virgil C. Johnson

  21st Miss. Regt.

  Kiled Nov. 30 1864

  and beneath in very small letters:

  Virtute Junxit Mors

  Non Separabit.

  “What do you think?” asked Bushrod.

  “Well, it is very nice,” said Anna, “but I believe you left an ‘l’ out of ‘lkilled’.”

  Bushrod frowned. “Well, damned if I—” he began, but checked himself and looked up guiltily. Anna waved it away.

  “Never mind,” she said. “I am growing used to soldier talk.”

  While Bushrod added the missing letter, Anna read the inscription to Nebo. She skipped the Latin, but Nebo asked her about it anyway, and she had to turn to Bushrod.

  “Well, all right—what does it mean?”

  Bushrod shrugged. “Well, it is imperfectly remembered. What I meant it to mean is,‘What valor has joined, death will not separate’.”

  “Yes,” said Anna. “Of course it would mean something like that.”

  A temper in her voice made Bushrod look up, but Anna had already risen and turned her face away. “Old Quinche could have done it right, but he ain’t here,” said Bushrod.

  Anna did not ask who Old Quinche was. She walked to the sweet-gum tree and looked off toward the grave.

  “Well, all right,” said Bushrod. He unlimbered himself from the ground. “Let us do it then, Nebo.”

  Anna Hereford pressed her back against the tree trunk and watched as Bushrod and Nebo pulled the blanket away from the two dead men. By now the living were almost as stiff as the dead; Anna found that the hardest thing to watch was the slow, painful movements of her companions. But they took up Jack Bishop, and bore him clumsily, and laid him in the grave.

  Then there was a problem with Virgil C. “I do not want to see his face,” said Bushrod, “but we got to turn him over. He can’t be buried like this, I won’t have it, I—”

  “You go on,” said Nebo. “I can fix him.”

  “No, you ought not to have to do it by yourself. Maybe I could—”

  Nebo, gaunt and muddied, swayed against the gray curtain of the trees. He lifted his arm, pointed a bony finger toward Anna. “You go stand over there, old Bushrod. You let me fix him.”

  “Yes,” said Anna. “Come away from there, boy.”

  “Oh, me,” said Bushrod, ashamed of his weakness. He looked down at Virgil C., knowing it was for the last time. The place where Nebo’s ball and ramrod had entered was crusted with black blood (there were no flies, for once), the hair around it matted and stiff. The out-flung, rigid arms ended in hands that had clawed at the grass in the last moment of life; one hand was open, the other was still clenched, still holding a tuft of dry grass. Virgil C.’s gray jacket was hunched at the shoulders, pulled up at the waist so Bushrod could see the striped pattern of his shirt. One of the suspender buttons was gone from the trousers, the dry leather tabs of the braces curled up like tongues.

  “No,” said Bushrod softly. “No, no, no.” It was all he could think of to say. Then he raised his eyes to the living man who stood on the edge of the grave.

  Nebo caught the look, took a step backward, nearly fell into the hole. “What?” he said. “What, old Bushrod?”

  Bushrod moved around Virgil C.’s body and came up to Nebo, put his hand on the man’s chest, believed for an instant that he only had to push to set things right: Nebo in the grave, not Virgil C.

  Anna’s voice came to him from some distant place, but there were no words. There was only the press of his hand against Nebo’s chest and the man’s face, thin and gray and empty of understanding, and the gaping muddy hole from which Jack Bishop watched with mild disapproval, and then Jack Bishop wagged his finger at Bushrod and his voice crept into Bushrod’s head: Let it be, old pard—there has been enough killin for one day.

  “Bushrod, let it be!” said Anna, her voice hard, asking no argument, like a school bell ringing. “You come away from there and let it be!”

  So Bushrod let it be. He dropped his hand. “All right then, Nebo,” he said. “You fix him best you can.” Then he turned and, without looking back, began to walk across the little way to the sweetgum tree where Anna Hereford waited.

  Once, on a grassy hill, in a web of sunlight spun from the blue autumn sky, a boy sat musing.

  All around him the long summer was dying. It was still warm for the season, there had been no killing frost, yet the grass was brown and the trees had done their turning just the same: yellow for hickories, purple for the sweetgums, the oaks gone to red and orange, all arrayed to the margins of the world in a glory of farewell. From the town below came the ringing of old Campbell the Smith’s hammer; the boy could see the Norman tower of Holy Cross and the ambitious spire of the Presbyterians, the courthouse cupola with its flag waving lazily in the breeze. Down there, too, was the house where the boy had lived all his sixteen years.

  The house stood at the end of what had once been a logging road but was now an actual street in the town of Cumberland. A two-storied ell of unpainted cypress, the house looked like a dozen others in the town, right down to the columned portico tacked on the southerly face like an afterthought. The boy’s room upstairs was southerly too; in winter the sun slanted through the boy’s windows and threw long bright rectangles on the floor. When the house was built, the boy’s papa had caused a stand of oaks to be planted around it; these were a generation old now and thrived on the good soil, on the memory of the vanished woods that had preceded them. Year by year the oak trees stretched their limbs closer to the sun, and though twenty years had not sent them high enough to block the sun from the boy’s room, now and then in summer a shadow of leaves moved across the windows in quiet prophecy.

  There were ghosts in the house down there. His mother and stillborn sister gone together. The elder brother who went to sea with Uncle Jarvis and drowned off the African coast. A man his papa had shot in the yard (he remembered that very well: his papa had been shaving, went out in the yard with his braces dangling, dragged the man off his horse and shot him and broke the man’s shotgun across the gatepost, all before the lather dried). The boy had seen all these phantoms, one time or another.

  Now the wind stirred on the hill, bringing a swirl of leaves that settled over the broomsage and goldenrod like a flock of yellow birds, bringing the green smell of cedar from the brakes. The courthouse clock began a slow and measured chime: high twelve it was, the watershed of the day. The Smith’s hammer had ceased. Pretty soon, the boy’s papa would be crossing the square to the Planter’s Hotel, where old Doniphan’s mut
e sister would be ringing the dinner bell. Down there, too, Terrible Miss Chastain would be standing tight-lipped and cross-armed while the schoolhouse mob emptied noisily into the yard.

  The boy wished he hadn’t thought of that. He ought to be in school right now, and Terrible Miss Chastain would make it warm for him tomorrow. No doubt she would make it even warmer for his cousin Remy Dangerfield, who at this moment was lying on the grass beside him, pillowed in moss, in a cotton shift the color of old daisies. Her arm was flung across her face, her bare feet crossed at the ankles. Under the shift, her small pointed breasts rose and fell in the slow breathing of sleep.

  Cousin Remy came to stay every summer when the yellow fever got bad in New Orleans. This year she was staying late and so ought to have been down in the schoolyard on this glorious noon, instead of dreaming on the hillside. The boy wondered what elaborate lie he might concoct to protect his cousin from Miss Chastain’s wrath, even though it had been Remy’s idea to slip off in the first place. “Hey, Remy Dangerfield,” said the boy, and nudged her foot with his own. But his cousin did not wake, only moved her coltish legs and sighed.

  The boy sighed too, and watched his cousin sleeping. Before this summer, he could not recall ever wanting to look at her just to be looking. There had not been much to look at anyway: a girl who, had he not known she was a girl, might as well have been a boy. In fact, before this summer she had out-boyed even the rowdy hard-ankles of Cumberland to the point where they were all half afraid of her. But sometime in her last winter’s passage she had changed.

  This June, when the boy and his papa and old Deacon had gone up to Wyatt’s Landing to meet Remy’s boat, they discovered she’d brought three trunksful of clothes—two more than she’d ever brought before. Then, at home, when the boy tried to point out things he’d saved up to show her—a fence lizard that would ride on your shoulder, a crow’s skull, a water moccasin skin, a big hornet’s nest, the new locomotive on the Mississippi Central—she showed no interest. In the case of the snake skin, she refused even to look at it, said it stank and turned on her heel and stalked away. Through the hot summer months she spurned the very boys she’d once bullied into following her, and took up with other girls the secret, unfathomable life that dwelt behind trellises and in parlors bright with afternoon. Toward the end of August, when the sun was beginning to arc toward the south and all the gardens and their once-bright flowers were growing rusty and old, Remy kept to her room nearly all the time. The boy would find her there, sitting by the window, reading or staring out at the blue fall of shadows in the yard, and after a while he understood that wherever she was he could not reach her there. So he went his own way and was strangely lonesome for her.